E.L. Doctorow Quotes

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

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.

I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.

When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.

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

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.

A book begins as a private excitement of the mind.

I worry about images. Images are what things mean.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

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

A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.

Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.

When you're working well, you don't do research. Whatever you need comes to you.

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

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?

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

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

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

Movies are too literal.

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.

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

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

Communists have no respect for people, only for positions.

Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

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

Dad is always hiding in his book.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.

What's the point of a houseful of books you've already read?

The marriage seemed to flourish on Father’s extended absences. ” Ragtime

Somehow he had catapulted himself beyond the world's value system. But this very fact lay upon him an awesome responsibility to maintain the illusions of other men.

Every good thing comes to some kind of end, and then the really good things come to a beginning again.

It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them.

[Freud] "sat in his quiet cozy study in Vienna, glad to be back. He said to Ernest Jones, America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake.” Ragtime

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights but you can make the whole trip that way.

Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

A book is not complete until it’s read