E. L. Doctorow quotes

E. L. Doctorow was an American novelist, editor, and professor, known for his works blending history and fiction. His novels, such as "Ragtime" and "Billy Bathgate," explore American life through innovative narrative techniques. He was celebrated for his ability to reimagine historical events and figures in compelling, thought-provoking ways. Here are 40 of his quotes:

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

E. L. Doctorow

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

E. L. Doctorow

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

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

E. L. Doctorow

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

E. L. Doctorow

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

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

E. L. Doctorow

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

E. L. Doctorow

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

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

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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

E. L. Doctorow

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

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

E. L. Doctorow

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

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

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

E. L. Doctorow

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

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

E. L. Doctorow

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

Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.

E. L. Doctorow