Quote

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

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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
Question
Exploited
Answers
Persuaded
Often
Masses
Identify
Permit
Mass
Answer
Asked
Ragtime

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Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
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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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Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.
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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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All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible.
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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.
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We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.
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A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.
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Dad is always hiding in his book.
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A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy.
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The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.
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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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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.
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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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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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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
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The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.
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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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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
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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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