E.L. Doctorow Quotes

“It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”

“Murders are exciting and lift people into a heart-beating awe as religion is supposed to do, after seeing one in the street young couples will go back to bed and make love, people will cross themselves and thank God for the gift of their stuporous lives, old folks will talk to each other over cups of hot water with lemon because murders are enlivened sermons to be analyzed and considered and relished, they speak to the timid of the dangers of rebellion, murders are perceived as momentary descents of God and so provide joy and hope and righteous satisfaction to parishioners, who will talk about them for years afterward to anyone who will listen.”

“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.”

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

“I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.”

“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”

“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining... researching... talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.”

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

“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.”

“The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.”

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

“There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.”

“You can’t remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.”