Top 100 E. L. Doctorow Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”

— E. L. Doctorow

Featured in: Creativity Quotes, Quotes About Writing

2. “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

3. “The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.”

— E. L. Doctorow

4. “The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.”

— E. L. Doctorow

5. “Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.”

— E. L. Doctorow

6. “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

7. “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who’s lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?”

— E. L. Doctorow

8. “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

9. “Planning to write is not writing.”

— E. L. Doctorow

10. “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

11. “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

12. “A book begins as a private excitement of the mind.”

— E. L. Doctorow

13. “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

14. “The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.”

— E. L. Doctorow

15. “The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.”

— E. L. Doctorow

16. “Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.”

— E. L. Doctorow

17. “One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing.”

— E. L. Doctorow

18. “There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.”

— E. L. Doctorow

19. “The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles.”

— E. L. Doctorow

20. “The act of composition is a series of discoveries.”

— E. L. Doctorow

21. “Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.”

— E. L. Doctorow

22. “Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.”

— E. L. Doctorow

23. “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

24. “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

25. “A new reader shouldn’t be able to find you in your work, though someone who’s read more may begin to.”

— E. L. Doctorow

26. “Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.”

— E. L. Doctorow

27. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

28. “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

29. “A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy.”

— E. L. Doctorow

30. “I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.”

— E. L. Doctorow

31. “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

32. “Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.”

— E. L. Doctorow

33. “The genome of every human cell has memory. You know what that means? As evolved beings we have in our genes memories of the far past, of long-ago generations, memories of experiences not our own.”

— E. L. Doctorow

34. “I’ve had very little experience in my life. In fact, I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.”

— E. L. Doctorow

35. “We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.”

— E. L. Doctorow

36. “It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.”

— E. L. Doctorow

37. “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

38. “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

39. “I have committed many sins in my life. This precise sin-the sin against poets-is without absolution.”

— E. L. Doctorow

40. “And so do people pass out of one’s life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.”

— E. L. Doctorow

41. “Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.”

— E. L. Doctorow

42. “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

43. “It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them.”

— E. L. Doctorow

44. “Goldman sent off a letter to Evelyn: 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. Carrying his newspaper with your picture the laborer goes home to his wife, an exhausted workhorse with the veins standing out in her legs, and he dreams not of justice but of being rich.”

— E. L. Doctorow

45. “Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world’s commerce.”

— E. L. Doctorow

46. “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.”

— E. L. Doctorow

47. “Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.”

— E. L. Doctorow

48. “I’ve always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they’re relations, they have a place in the American family. They’re the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They’re the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.”

— E. L. Doctorow

49. “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

50. “The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.”

— E. L. Doctorow