Quote

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

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
Process
World
Ragtime
Dissatisfaction
Composed
Evident
Endless
Constantly

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I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.
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Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individual's calloused capacity to feel undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality.
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Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.
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I've known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they're ready to write, they can't move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.
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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.
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The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.
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When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.
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A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.
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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.
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If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.
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The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.
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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.
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I worry about images. Images are what things mean.
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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.
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Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.
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Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.
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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.
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The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.
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Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.
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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.
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