Top 133 Quotes & Sayings by E. L. Doctorow - Page 3

It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.

Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.

Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.

There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.

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.

Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world's commerce.

The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.

Dad is always hiding in his book.

We dress them [children] in the presumptions of the world. They are the bright small face of hope. They are the last belief we have, the belief in making them believe.

Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.

I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a child’s ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new things. He brought home coconuts, papayas, mangoes, and urged them on our reluctant conservative selves. On Sundays he liked to discover new places, take us on endless bus or trolley rides to some new park or beach he knew about. He always counseled daring, in whatever situation, the courage to test the unknown, an instruction that was thematically in opposition to my mother’s.

A writer's life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure's bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen... Except the act of writing.