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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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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
Work
Every
Transgression
Majors
Necessarily
Major
Artist
Art
Nature

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If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.
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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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I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.
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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.
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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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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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Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.
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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.
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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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The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.
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A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.
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Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
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I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.
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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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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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