Top 133 Quotes & Sayings by E. L. Doctorow - Page 2

Implications of treason are fed like cubes of sugar to the twelve-headed animal which is justice. In ... opening remarks. In the way questions are asked. In support of lines of questioning where cases of treason are cited and the Judge endorses the relevance of the citation.

And so do people pass out of one's life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.

All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible.

I've known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they're ready to write, they can't move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.

The act of composition is a series of discoveries.

Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.

Most people are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it were not their own.

A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

So that individuation may be compared to a pyramid in that it is only achieved by the placement of the top stone… The Jews, Ford said. They ain't like anyone else I know. There goes you theory up shits creek. He smiled.

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

Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.

The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.

A book begins as a private excitement of the mind.

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

An Animated Cartoon Theology: 1. People are animals. 2. The body is mortal and subject to incredible pain. 3. Life is antagonistic to the living. 4. The flesh can be sawed, crushed, frozen, stretched, burned, bombed, and plucked for music. 5. The dumb are abused by the smart and the smart destroyed by their own cunning. 6. The small are tortured by the large and the large destroyed by their own momentum. 7. We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates' name. And that is because Socrates' ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege.

I like commas. I detest semi-colons — I don’t think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

The images of things are not the things in themselves.

Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.

You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

Leo Crowley, Harry [Truman]'s Foreign Economic Administrator, tells Congressmen the theory...: 'If you create good governments in foreign countries, automatically you will have better markets for ourselves.' With that honeycunt staring you in the face, you'd forget your grammar too.

I've always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they're relations, they have a place in the American family. They're the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They're the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.

Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.

I have been everywhere because I don't know what I'm looking for.

I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.

The theory for admitting accomplice testimony that is uncorroborated is that conspiracy is by its nature secretive and that only the parties to it can know it occurred. But in practice this means the accomplice's guilt is modified to the degree that he can convict the defendant.

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.

There is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the distance has perhaps to do with distance - narrative distance - from the characters; it has to do with the kind of voice that is talking, but it certainly hasn't to do with the common distribution between fact and imagination.

We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.

The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.

Banks and churches and courtrooms all depend on the appurtenances of theatre. On illusion. Banks, the illusion of stability and honourable dealings to the rot and corruption of capitalist exploitation. Churches the illusion of sacred sanctuary of purposes of pacifying social discontent. Courtrooms of course designed to promote the illusion of solemn justice. If there was true justice why would such trappings be necessary? Wouldn't a table and chairs and an ordinary room serve just as well?

Planning to write is not writing.

The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.

Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.

Uncharged with invisible meaning, the visible is nothing, mere clay; and without visible circumstance, a territory, to connect to, our spirit is shapeless, nameless, and undefined.

And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.

It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.

It is the immigrant hordes who keep this country alive, the waves of them arriving year after year.... Who believes in America more than the people who run down the gangplank and kiss the ground?

Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.

I have committed many sins in my life. This precise sin-the sin against poets-is without absolution.

Communists have no respect for people, only for positions.

The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.

What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies....Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.

I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.

I worry about images. Images are what things mean.

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with 'World's Fair' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.

I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who's lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?

I lived in New York for a couple months. It seemed to me at first an incredibly clean place with well-dressed people and washed cars and bright-painted red-and-yellow streetcars and white buildings.

And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.

There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.

Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.

I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.

The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles.

Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individual's calloused capacity to feel undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing - none of that is writing. Writing is writing. Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.