Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The act of composition is a series of discoveries.
E. L. Doctorow
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Discoveries
Composition
Discovery
Series
Writing
More quotes by E. L. Doctorow
In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.
E. L. Doctorow
Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.
E. L. Doctorow
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.
E. L. Doctorow
The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.
E. L. Doctorow
We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.
E. L. Doctorow
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.
E. L. Doctorow
The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.
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
Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.
E. L. Doctorow
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
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
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
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
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
Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.
E. L. Doctorow
The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.
E. L. Doctorow
It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.
E. L. Doctorow
The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.
E. L. Doctorow
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
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
