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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.

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
Theory
Ford
Goes
Smiled
Shits
Anyone
Compared
Individuation
Else
Jews
Creek
May
Achieved
Placement
Like
Jew
Creeks
Stone
Pyramid
Stones
Pyramids

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The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.
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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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I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.
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And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.
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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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Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.
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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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Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
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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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A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.
E. L. Doctorow
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The act of composition is a series of discoveries.
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I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.
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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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History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
E. L. Doctorow
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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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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.
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.
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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.
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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