Top 100 E. L. Doctorow Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.”

— E. L. Doctorow

52. “Communists have no respect for people, only for positions.”

— E. L. Doctorow

53. “Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.”

— E. L. Doctorow

54. “Most people are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it were not their own.”

— E. L. Doctorow

55. “The marriage seemed to flourish on Father’s extended absences. ” Ragtime.”

— E. L. Doctorow

56. “I worry about images. Images are what things mean.”

— E. L. Doctorow

57. “When you’re working well, you don’t do research. Whatever you need comes to you.”

— E. L. Doctorow

58. “Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.”

— E. L. Doctorow

59. “The images of things are not the things in themselves.”

— E. L. Doctorow

60. “Suppose I could prove to you that there are universal patterns of order and repetition that give meaning to the activity of this planet. Suppose I could demonstrate that you yourself are an instrumentation in our modern age of trends.”

— E. L. Doctorow

61. “I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don’t know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks.”

— E. L. Doctorow

62. “Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.”

— E. L. Doctorow

63. “We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.”

— E. L. Doctorow

64. “Happiness consists of living in the dailyness of life and not knowing how happy you are. True happiness comes of not knowing you’re happy, it’s an animal serenity, something between contentment and joy, a steadiness of the belonged self in the world.”

— E. L. Doctorow

65. “There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.”

— E. L. Doctorow

66. “A book is not complete until it’s read.”

— E. L. Doctorow

67. “A novelist is a person who lives in other people’s skins.”

— E. L. Doctorow

68. “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. I did that with ‘World’s Fair’ as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.”

— E. L. Doctorow

69. “It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.”

— E. L. Doctorow

70. “The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.”

— E. L. Doctorow

71. “And why? Is our genius only in our wombs? Can we not write books and create learned scholarship and perform music and provide philosophical models for the betterment of mankind?”

— E. L. Doctorow

72. “A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader’s own life.”

— E. L. Doctorow

73. “And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.”

— E. L. Doctorow

74. “Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.”

— E. L. Doctorow

75. “Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.”

— E. L. Doctorow

76. “I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.”

— E. L. Doctorow

77. “I thought I would lose, so I didn’t prepare a speech.”

— E. L. Doctorow

78. “Dad is always hiding in his book.”

— E. L. Doctorow

79. “It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.”

— E. L. Doctorow

80. “And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.”

— E. L. Doctorow

81. “If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.”

— E. L. Doctorow

82. “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

83. “Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as ‘fact’ are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.”

— E. L. Doctorow

84. “Movies are too literal.”

— E. L. Doctorow

85. “It’s a kind of jail, the brain’s mind. We’ve got these mysterious three-pound brains and they jail us.”

— E. L. Doctorow

86. “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

87. “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.”

— E. L. Doctorow

88. “I have been everywhere because I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

— E. L. Doctorow

89. “Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.”

— E. L. Doctorow

90. “And now I will tell of the revels that went on for three nights and two days in the brothel on West Seventy-sixth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues.”

— E. L. Doctorow

91. “He was a moody, distracted young fellow, and it was clear his own mind was more company to him than people were.”

— E. L. Doctorow

92. “Grandmamma had been the last connection to our past. I had understood her as some referent moral authority to whom we paid no heed, but by whose judgments we measured our waywardness.”

— E. L. Doctorow

93. “For a moment he thought the chair was aligned, but then he decided it was not. He moved it another turn to the right. He tried sitting in the chair now but it still felt peculiar. He turned it again. Eventually he made a complete circle and still he could not find the proper alignment for the chair.”

— E. L. Doctorow

94. “I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.”

— E. L. Doctorow

95. “To Morgan, the disfigurement of his monstrous nose was the touch of God upon him, the assurance of mortality. It was the steadiest assurance he had.”

— E. L. Doctorow

96. “What Disneyland proposes is a technique of abbreviated shorthand culture for the masses, a mindless thrill, like an electric shock, that insists at the same time on the recipient’s rich psychic relation to his country’s history and language and literature. In a forthcoming time of highly governed masses in an overpopulated world, this technique may be extremely useful both as a substitute for education and, eventually, as a substitute for experience.”

— E. L. Doctorow

97. “I keep thinking someone will come by sometime who will want to use the wood.”

— E. L. Doctorow

98. “I knew he was the real thing because when he laughed other men at the table laughed with him.”

— E. L. Doctorow

99. “All writers are unaffiliated. The novelist, the poet, will understand the institutions they live within, including their religious traditions, as aggregate historically amended fictions. Appointing themselves as witnesses, they are necessarily independent of all institutions, including the institution of the family-which may be why nothing makes family members more nervous than the discovery that one of them is a writer.”

— E. L. Doctorow

100. “I am thus led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative... A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader’s own life.”

— E. L. Doctorow