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The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.
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
Giving
Documents
Important
Cards
Library
Birth
Certificate
Gives
Certificates
Society
Passport
Free
Passports
Three
Card
More quotes by E. L. Doctorow
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
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
Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.
E. L. Doctorow
Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.
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
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
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
I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.
E. L. Doctorow
Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.
E. L. Doctorow
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.
E. L. Doctorow
The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.
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
If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.
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 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
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
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
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
E. L. Doctorow
