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I lived in New York for a couple months. It seemed to me at first an incredibly clean place with well-dressed people and washed cars and bright-painted red-and-yellow streetcars and white buildings.

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
First
Couple
Incredibly
People
Months
Bright
Building
Red
Washed
White
Seemed
Painted
Place
Car
Buildings
Wells
Clean
Dressed
Firsts
York
Cars
Well
Lived
Yellow

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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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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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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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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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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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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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Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.
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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.
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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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The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.
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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.
E. L. Doctorow
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Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.
E. L. Doctorow
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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 theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.
E. L. Doctorow
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I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.
E. L. Doctorow
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The act of composition is a series of discoveries.
E. L. Doctorow
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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
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Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.
E. L. Doctorow
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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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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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