Doctorow The Book Quotes & Sayings

My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better. — E.L. Doctorow

Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author's. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is unlike the others because you are not bringing the same voice to every book. I think that keeps you alive as a writer. — E.L. Doctorow

So many secrets," he said. "The Dallas Aristocracy and their freaking secrets. — R.J. Scott

I want to show how much fun you can have drawing ... parents and children can draw together as a wonderful shared activity. — Chris Riddell

There is so much indifference in the face of suffering. May we overcome indifference with concrete acts of charity. — Pope Francis

I can assure you Ernest Hemingway was wrong when he said modern American literature began with Huckleberry Finn. It begins with Moby-Dick, the book that swallowed European civilization whole. — E.L. Doctorow

For instance, with "Ragtime" I was so desperate to write something, I was facing the wall of my study in my house in New Rochelle and so I started to write about the wall. That's the kind of day we sometimes have, as writers. Then I wrote about the house that was attached to the wall. It was built in 1906, you see, so I thought about the era and what Braodviw Avenue looked like then: trolley cars ran along the avenue down at the bottom of the hill; people wore white clothes in summer to stay cool. Teddy Roosevelt was president. One thing led to another and that's the way that book began: through desperation to those few images ... - 92nd Street YMHA Interview — E.L. Doctorow

There are people already sharing eBooks out there, .. and they do it simply because they love books. You don't buy a second copy of a book, cut the spine off, lay each page on a scanner, run that .tif through an OCR (Optical Character Reader), hand edit the resulting output for errors and then post it online if you don't love the book. it can up to 80 hours to turn a printed novel into an eBook. I figure if someone out there is willing to put in 80 hours of work promoting my book, then I'd prefer they do it in a way that gives a better return to me. — Cory Doctorow

Bad love is better than no love at all, at least you know you're alive. — Kris Kristofferson

When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it. — E.L. Doctorow

Dad is always hiding in his book. — E.L. Doctorow

I don't think anything I've written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years to write a book. 'World's Fair' was an exception. It seemed to be a particularly fluent book as it came. I did it in seven months. I think what happened in that case is that God gave me a bonus book. — E.L. Doctorow

The strictness of to-day may have at any moment to be purchased by the laxity of to-morrow. — Mary Augusta Ward

I had this really great amazing thing happen where I almost finished the book and I really needed to come up with an ending and I decided to go back and re-read the book and see if I could come up with an ending. — Cory Doctorow

A book is not complete until it's read — E.L. Doctorow

A book begins as a private excitement of the mind. — E.L. Doctorow

I had an amazing teacher, who was Burmese, and she was living in Paris at the time, and she is one of very few who doesn't actually receive a credit in the film because she still has family over there. — Michelle Yeoh

Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read. — E.L. Doctorow

I didn't think I was going to play that day. I'd have to thank the training staff for getting me on the field that day. They made a bigger deal than I thought it was. — Ken Caminiti

Breaking rules is indeed an important part of creativity. Innovation needs a level of guidance. — Pearl Zhu

We're your daughters, mister. We're your girlfriends, we're your sisters, we're your precious baby girls. Goddammit, listen. — Colleen Curran

Making stuff: The folks at Instructables have put up some killer HOWTOs for building the technology in this book. It's easy and incredibly fun. There's nothing so rewarding in this world as making stuff, especially stuff that makes you more free. — Cory Doctorow

Most of the books, music and movies ever released are not available for sale, anywhere in the world. In the brief time that P2P nets have flourished, the ad-hoc masses of the Internet have managed to put just about everything online. What's more, they've done it far cheaper than any other archiving/revival effort ever. — Cory Doctorow

I dream of a world where the truth is what shapes people's politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading it on paper. — Cory Doctorow

I know more polkas than Frankie Yankovic. I grew up next door to the Polka Tavern in Milwaukee. I can sing some polkas. And proud of that. — Al Jarreau

A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy. — E.L. Doctorow

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake. — E.L. Doctorow

We're not outside the world... We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don't say the words, what is their in our world? — Ursula K. Le Guin

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer. — E.L. Doctorow

The literary experience extends impression into discourse. It flowers to thought with nouns, verbs, objects. It thinks. Film implodes discourse, it deliterates thought, it shrinks it to the compacted meaning of the preverbal impression or intuition or understanding. You receive what you see, you don't have to think it out ... Fiction goes everywhere, inside, outside, it stops, it goes, its action can be mental. Nor is it time-driven. Film is time-driven, it never ruminates, it shows the outside of life, it shows behavior. It tends to the simplest moral reasoning. Films out of Hollywood are linear. The narrative simplification of complex morally consequential reality is always the drift of a film inspired by a book. Novels can do anything in the dark horrors of consciousness. Films do close-ups, car drive-ups, places, chases and explosions. — E.L. Doctorow

A lack of planning leads to failure. — Sunday Adelaja

Something I realized when I moved to America: people get these general American accents, but when they get angry or upset or excited, their original accents come out. It's something I noticed with my manager, because he's from New York, and the first time he got angry, he suddenly had this accent. — Margot Robbie

Face-book has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is! — Cory Doctorow

So close the book and go. The world is full of security systems. Hack one of them. — Cory Doctorow

If fathers aren't growing up, I would challenge them to want to be a father that is present in the home, so that their kids have that identity. — Benjamin Watson