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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
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E. L. Doctorow
Age: 84 †
Born: 1931
Born: January 6
Died: 2015
Died: July 21
Author
Essayist
Faculty Member
Novelist
Playwright
Professor
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Edgar Laurence Doctorow
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow
Made
Scary
Writers
Writer
Ragtime
Century
Witnesses
Reason
Vacuums
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Vacuum
Needs
Terrifying
Writing
Witness
More quotes by E. L. Doctorow
Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.
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
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
Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.
E. L. Doctorow
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
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
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
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
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
Implications of treason are fed like cubes of sugar to the twelve-headed animal which is justice. In ... opening remarks. In the way questions are asked. In support of lines of questioning where cases of treason are cited and the Judge endorses the relevance of the citation.
E. L. Doctorow
I worry about images. Images are what things mean.
E. L. Doctorow
If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.
E. L. Doctorow
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
I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.
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
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
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.
E. L. Doctorow
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
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
And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.
E. L. Doctorow
