E. L. Doctorow Quotes

Best E.L. Doctorow Quotes

E L Doctorow Quotes on Writing

1. Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. – E L Doctorow.
2. [Writing is] like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. – E L Doctorow.
3. 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. – E L Doctorow.
4. Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. – E L Doctorow.
5. There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking. – E L Doctorow.
6. 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. – E L Doctorow.
7. Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing. – E L Doctorow.
   

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8. I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them. – E L Doctorow.
9. There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was ‘The Adventures of Augie March’ – the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was ‘The U.S.A. Trilogy,’ by John Dos Passos. – E L Doctorow.
10. Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. E L Doctorow.
11. Movies are too literal. – E L Doctorow.
12. 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. E L Doctorow.
13. 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.
14. A novelist is a person who lives in other people’s skins. – E L Doctorow.
15. 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. – E L Doctorow.
16. Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours. – E L Doctorow.
17. Because like all whores you value propriety. You are a 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. – E L Doctorow.
18. Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne. – E L Doctorow.
19. When you’re working well, you don’t do research. Whatever you need comes to you. – E L Doctorow.
20. “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.
21. My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn’t write without feeling he was repeating himself. That’s the worst thing that can happen to a writer. – E L Doctorow.
22. A new reader shouldn’t be able to find you in your work, though someone who’s read more may begin to. – E L Doctorow.
23. 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.
24. 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. – E L Doctorow.
25. The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card. – E L Doctorow.
26. 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. – E L Doctorow.
27. …if justice cannot be made to operate under the worst possible conditions of social hysteria, what does it matter how it operates at other times? – E L Doctorow.
28. “And why? Is our genius only in our wombs? Can we not write books and create learned scholarship and perform music and provide philosophical models for the betterment of mankind?” – E L Doctorow.
29. I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist – or perhaps a national novelist. – E L Doctorow.
30. My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better. – E L Doctorow.
31. I discovered Einstein said the same thing about his celebrated theories of relativity that writers say about their work when he said he didn’t have any feelings of personal possession of these ideas. Once they were out there, they came from somewhere else. And that’s exactly the feeling when you write. You don’t feel possessive about it. – E L Doctorow.
32. “The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.” – E L Doctorow.
33. Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.
34. The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity. – E L Doctorow.
35. The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like. – E L Doctorow.
    

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36. I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist – or perhaps a national novelist. – E L Doctorow.
37. “I take the position that true faith is not a super sessional knowledge. It cannot discard the intellect.”
38. “And so, the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.” – E.L. Doctorow, City of God.
39. “You want God? Don’t look at Scripture, look everywhere, at the planets, the constellations, the universe. Look at a bug, a flea. Look at the manifold wonders of creation, including the Nazis. That’s the kind of God you’re dealing with.” – E.L. Doctorow, City of God.
40. “The story was clearly over, as in juggling when the ball you throw up finds the moment to come down, hesitates as if it might not, and then drop at the same speed of that celestial light. And life is no longer good but just what you happen to be holding.” – E L Doctorow, Billy Bathgate.
41. “Grandmamma had been the last connection to our past. I had understood her as some referent moral authority to whom we paid no heed, but by whose judgments we measured our waywardness.”
42. “I’m Homer, the blind brother.” – E.L. Doctorow, Homer & Langley.
43. “The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.”– E.L. Doctorow.
    

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44. “She’s some kind of Socialist-anarchist-anarcho-syndicalist-Communist. Unless you’re one of them you can’t tell exactly what any of them are.” – E.L. Doctorow, Homer & Langley.
45. “I remember holding her in my arms and absolving God of meaninglessness.” – E. L. Doctorow, Homer & Langley.
46. “Where most people live, most of us, imagining it to be the real sunlit world when it is only a cave lit by the flickering fires of illusion.” – E.L. Doctorow, Andrew’s Brain.
47. “Happiness consists of living in the dailiness of life and not knowing how happy you are. True happiness comes of not knowing you’re happy.” – E.L. Doctorow, Andrew’s Brain.
48. I asked this question: How can I think about my brain when it’s my brain doing the thinking? So, is this brain pretending to be me thinking about it? – E.L. Doctorow, Andrew’s Brain.
49. “The ultimate technological achievement will be escaping from the mess we’ve made. There will be none after that because we will reproduce everything that we did on earth, we’ll go through the whole sequence all over again somewhere else, and people will read my paper as prophecy, and know that having gotten off one planet, they will be able to destroy another with confidence.” – E.L. Doctorow, Homer & Langley.
50. “Langley would never complete his newspaper project. I knew that and I’m sure he knew it as well. It was a crazy foolish hand-rubbing scheme that kept his mind in the mood he liked to be in.” – E.L. Doctorow, Homer & Langley.
51. “Orthodox devotions that do not let in the light of modern knowledge are no more than a form of ancestor worship.” – E.L. Doctorow.
52. “Perhaps we all reappear, perhaps all our lives are impositions one on another.” – E L Doctorow, Loon Lake.

E L Doctorow Quotes on Life

52. “Father looked at her and she was beautiful in the way she had been as a girl. He did not realize the pleasure he felt in having made her cry.” E L Doctorow,
53. “You’re nothing more than a clever prostitute. You accepted the conditions in which you found yourself and you triumphed.” – E L Doctorow, Ragtime.
54. “No longer expecting to be beautiful and touched with grace till the end of her days, she was coming to the realization that whereas once, in his courtship, Father might have embodied the infinite possibilities of loving, he had aged and gone dull, made stupid, perhaps, by his travels and his work, so that more and more he only demonstrated his limits, that he had reached them, and that he would never move beyond them.” – E L Doctorow, Ragtime.
55. It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction. – E L Doctorow, Ragtime.
56. We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being. – E L Doctorow, Ragtime.
57. “Thus, with continued concentration and the expenditure of enormous amounts of energy he tried to keep himself from slipping into the vast distances of his unhappiness. It was all around him. It was darkness as impudently close as his brow. It choked him by its closeness. And what was most terrifying was its treachery. He would wake up in the morning and see the sun coming in the window, and sit up in his bed and think it was gone, and then find it there after all, behind his ears or in his heart.” – E L Doctorow, Ragtime.
58. “His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a straitjacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin. His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. He waved to the crowd. He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He escaped from a Siberian exile van. From a Chinese torture crucifix. From a Hamburg penitentiary. From an English prison ship. From a Boston jail. He was chained to automobile tires, water wheels, cannon, and he escaped. He dove manacled from a bridge into the Mississippi, the Seine, the Mersey, and came up waving. He hung upside down and strait-jacketed from cranes, biplanes, and the tops of buildings. He was dropped into the ocean padlocked in a diving suit fully weighted and not connected to an air supply, and he escaped. He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued. Hurriedly, they dug him out. The earth is too heavy, he said gasping. His nails bled. Soil fell from his eyes. He was drained of color and couldn’t stand. His assistant threw up. Houdini wheezed and sputtered. He coughed blood. They cleaned him off and took him back to the hotel. Today, nearly fifty years since his death, the audience for escapes is even larger.” – E L Doctorow, Ragtime.
59. “Because like all whores you value propriety. You are a 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.” – E L Doctorow, Ragtime.
60. “The consumption of food was a sacrament of success. A man who carried a great stomach before him was thought to be in his prime. Women went into hospitals to die of burst bladders, collapsed lungs, overtaxed hearts, and meningitis of the spine. There was heavy traffic to the spas and sulphur springs, where the purgative was valued as an inducement to the appetite. America was a great farting country. All this began to change when Taft moved into the White House. His accession to the one mythic office in the American imagination weighed everyone down. His great figure immediately expressed the apotheosis of that style of man. Thereafter fashion would go the other way and only poor people would be stout.” – E L Doctorow, Ragtime
61. “Poor Father, I see his final exploration. He arrives at the new place, his hair risen in astonishment, his mouth and eyes dumb. His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his arms spread in pantomimic celebration, the immigrant, as in every moment of his life, arriving eternally on the shore of his Self.” – E L Doctorow, Ragtime.
62. “When the Great War came, he would wage it with the fury of the affronted. Neither Theodore Roosevelt’s son Quentin, who was to die in a dogfight over France, nor the old Bull Moose himself, who was to die in grief not long thereafter, would survive Wilson’s abhorrence of war.” – E L Doctorow, Ragtime.
63. “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.” – E L Doctorow, Ragtime Quotes.
64. “Goldman sent off a letter to Evelyn: 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. Carrying his newspaper with your picture the laborer goes home to his wife, an exhausted workhorse with the veins standing out in her legs, and he dreams not of justice but of being rich.” – E L Doctorow, Ragtime Quotes.
65. “The businessmen wondered if they could create such individuals not from the accidents of news events but from the deliberate manufactures of their own medium.” – E L Doctorow,
66. “Suppose I could prove to you that there are universal patterns of order and repetition that give meaning to the activity of this planet. Suppose I could demonstrate that you yourself are an instrumentation in our modern age of trends” – E L Doctorow,
67. “The forms of life were volatile and that everything in the world could as easily be something else.” – E L Doctorow,
68. “For a moment he thought the chair was aligned, but then he decided it was not. He moved it another turn to the right. He tried sitting in the chair now but it still felt peculiar. He turned it again. Eventually, he made a complete circle and still he could not find the proper alignment for the chair.” – E L Doctorow,
69. “To Morgan, the disfigurement of his monstrous nose was the touch of God upon him, the assurance of mortality. It was the steadiest assurance he had.” – E L Doctorow,