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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.

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
Dominating
Authority
Feeling
Culture
Lost
Feelings

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The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.
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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.
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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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Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.
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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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A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.
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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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If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.
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The act of composition is a series of discoveries.
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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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