Quote

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.

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
Way
Authority
Vocabularies
Make
Fiction
Remake
World
Single
Remakes
Special
Vocabulary
Knowing
Discourse
Call
Total
Writing
Ancient
Mind
Democratic

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Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.
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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.
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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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A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.
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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.
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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.
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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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The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.
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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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I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.
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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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Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.
E. L. Doctorow
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I worry about images. Images are what things mean.
E. L. Doctorow
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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.
E. L. Doctorow
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The act of composition is a series of discoveries.
E. L. Doctorow
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If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.
E. L. Doctorow
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Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.
E. L. Doctorow
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I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.
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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've always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they're relations, they have a place in the American family. They're the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They're the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.
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