Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor. E. L. Doctorow More Quotes by E. L. Doctorow More Quotes From E. L. Doctorow Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. E. L. Doctorow personal-writing exploration writing The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card. E. L. Doctorow library important giving I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them. E. L. Doctorow ragtime permit answers 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 journey writing night The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like. E. L. Doctorow ragtime historian novelists 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 ministry dumb country Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless. E. L. Doctorow ethics useless gold Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. E. L. Doctorow nature rain writing You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again. E. L. Doctorow heart memories sex Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. E. L. Doctorow inspiration writing talking 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 cry heart world There is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the distance has perhaps to do with distance - narrative distance - from the characters; it has to do with the kind of voice that is talking, but it certainly hasn't to do with the common distribution between fact and imagination. E. L. Doctorow distance voice character We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy. E. L. Doctorow edges littles 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. E. L. Doctorow vocabulary knowing writing Planning to write is not writing. E. L. Doctorow planning writing A book begins as a private excitement of the mind. E. L. Doctorow excitement mind book The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles. E. L. Doctorow pay-the-price philosophical people Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. E. L. Doctorow schizophrenia form writing A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins. E. L. Doctorow skins writing people I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them. E. L. Doctorow musician knows writing
