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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.
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
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Way
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Wall
Face
Faces
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Seals
More quotes by E. L. Doctorow
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.
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
A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.
E. L. Doctorow
History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
E. L. Doctorow
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.
E. L. Doctorow
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
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.
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
The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.
E. L. Doctorow
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
The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.
E. L. Doctorow
If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.
E. L. Doctorow
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
Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.
E. L. Doctorow
Dad is always hiding in his book.
E. L. Doctorow
And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.
E. L. Doctorow
The act of composition is a series of discoveries.
E. L. Doctorow
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
Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.
E. L. Doctorow
I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.
E. L. Doctorow
