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

More quotes by E. L. Doctorow

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Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.
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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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Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.
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The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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Dad is always hiding in his book.
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I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.
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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'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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The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.
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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.
E. L. Doctorow
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The act of composition is a series of discoveries.
E. L. Doctorow
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If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.
E. L. Doctorow
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Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
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The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.
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A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.
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