Quote

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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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
Nothing
Blank
Much
Endless
Mind
Losing
Memories
Upon
Ghostly
Fear
Prevail
Become
Altogether
Live
Pale

More quotes by E. L. Doctorow

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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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Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.
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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.
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Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing - none of that is writing. Writing is writing. 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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Dad is always hiding in his book.
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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Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.
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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.
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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Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.
E. L. Doctorow
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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.
E. L. Doctorow
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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.
E. L. Doctorow
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And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.
E. L. Doctorow
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I worry about images. Images are what things mean.
E. L. Doctorow
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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.
E. L. Doctorow
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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
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The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.
E. L. Doctorow
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Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.
E. L. Doctorow
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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.
E. L. Doctorow
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A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.
E. L. Doctorow