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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.
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
Truth
Insensible
Today
Totalitarian
Country
Rendering
World
Ministry
Dumb
Assiduous
Countries
Clubbing
Language
Functionaries
History
Ministries
More quotes by E. L. Doctorow
A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
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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 novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.
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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.
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I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.
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Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.
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The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
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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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We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.
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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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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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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.
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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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Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.
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