E.L. Doctorow Quotes

I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.

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?

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.

The important thing about security systems isn’t how they work, it’s how they fail.

I choose YouTube over telly.

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

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

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

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

If you stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you.

He had them as spellbound as a room full of Ewoks listening to C-3PO.

The images of things are not the things in themselves.

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.

Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.

Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really having a deep relationship with it.

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

Funny, for all surveillance, Osama bin Laden is still free—and we're not. Guess who's winning the "war on terror?

I can't go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.

Where there's life, there's hope. Living people can change things, dead people cannot.

Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.

The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack.

I think that Utopia is a theory of human action.

The future's a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids.

My feelings towards Scott Card are pretty mixed. Politically, he and I are pretty far apart.

It's hard not to like Asimov; he's a really likable guy.

Disney is a delight, someone who ... sweeps those around him along on his dream.

We have a name for things that don't copy themselves: dead.

It's not necessarily about what career you pick. It's about how you do what you do.

The right to freedom of association is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine your social network to figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists?

No one should do a job he can do in his sleep.

The companies are multinational--why should labor still stick to borders?

If surgeons don't get surgeon's block, then why are you allowed to get writer's block?

For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it's time for them to help us to ignore.

Write even when the world is chaotic.

if it's not in my email archive, I don't know it

We roared. We were one big animal throat, roaring.

Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.

There is no future in which bits will be harder to copy than they are today ... Any business model that based on the idea that bits will be harder to copy is doomed.

Digital Distribution and the Whip Hand: Don't Get iTunesed with your eBooks

Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy.

These days, tales of what Facebook did with its users during the singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales.

Giant letters march across the dome of the sky: HOME NOT FOUND. Huw, who knows Comic Sans when she sees it, winces in mild disgust.

Any outfit that can't figure out clean toilets and decent theming on its own can't benefit from my advice.

It is not gender, nor age, nor race, but your ability to work hard at what you love.

Carlton Mellick III is one of bizarro fiction's most talented practitioners, a virtuoso of the surreal, science fictional tale.

Technology giveth and technology taketh away.

The idea that bigger haystacks have more needles in them is dumb on its face

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

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

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