Quote

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

E. L. Doctorow

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Constantly
Process
World
Ragtime
Dissatisfaction
Composed
Evident
Endless

More quotes by E. L. Doctorow

Image
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
Image
Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
The act of composition is a series of discoveries.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
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
Image
The theory for admitting accomplice testimony that is uncorroborated is that conspiracy is by its nature secretive and that only the parties to it can know it occurred. But in practice this means the accomplice's guilt is modified to the degree that he can convict the defendant.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
We dress them [children] in the presumptions of the world. They are the bright small face of hope. They are the last belief we have, the belief in making them believe.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
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
Image
So that individuation may be compared to a pyramid in that it is only achieved by the placement of the top stone… The Jews, Ford said. They ain't like anyone else I know. There goes you theory up shits creek. He smiled.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
Leo Crowley, Harry [Truman]'s Foreign Economic Administrator, tells Congressmen the theory...: 'If you create good governments in foreign countries, automatically you will have better markets for ourselves.' With that honeycunt staring you in the face, you'd forget your grammar too.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
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
Image
The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
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
Image
I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
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
Image
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