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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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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
Constitution
Consciousness
Law
Voice
Self
Giving
Inescapably
People
Solemn
Unto
More quotes by E. L. Doctorow
I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.
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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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Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
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I've known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they're ready to write, they can't move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.
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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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The act of composition is a series of discoveries.
E. L. Doctorow
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.
E. L. Doctorow
Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.
E. L. Doctorow
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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I like commas. I detest semi-colons — I don’t think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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
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 am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.
E. L. Doctorow
When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.
E. L. Doctorow
