E. L. Doctorow Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Writing #Exploration

“The act of composition is a series of discoveries.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Writing #Discovery #Composition

“The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Giving #Library #Important

“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

#Writing #Journey #Night

“The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Novelists #Historian

“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

#Inspiration #Writing #Talking

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Writing #Schizophrenia #Form

“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

#Nature #Rain #Writing

“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

#Answers #Permit #Mass

“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.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Thinking #Long #Needs

“History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Truth #Writing #Thinking

“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.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Writing #Vocabulary #Knowing

“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

#Writing #Musician

“Planning to write is not writing.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Writing #Planning

“We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Littles

“A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Writing #People #Skins

“In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Government #People #Facts

“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

#Book #Writing #People

“Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Play #Justice #Frustrated

“Most people are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it were not their own.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#People #World #Quiet

“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.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Writing #Doe #Life Is

“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.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#People #Humanity #Dominion

“Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Age #Stories #Able

“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.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Territory #Clay #Purpose

“A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Book #Sleep #Enemy

“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.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#New York #Couple #Yellow

“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.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Country #Dumb #Ministry

“It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Avid #America #Fiction

“There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Fiction #Narrative #Nonfiction

“Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.”
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Art #Important #Crime