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Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.
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
Images
Fiction
History
Facts
More quotes by E. L. Doctorow
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
I worry about images. Images are what things mean.
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
In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.
E. L. Doctorow
A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.
E. L. Doctorow
The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.
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
What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies....Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.
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
Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.
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
The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.
E. L. Doctorow
Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.
E. L. Doctorow
Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.
E. L. Doctorow
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.
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
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
It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.
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 led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.
E. L. Doctorow
