Quotes by E.L. Doctorow

“The marriage seemed to flourish on Fathers extended absences. Ragtime”

“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.”

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

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

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”

“Somehow he had catapulted himself beyond the world's value system. But this very fact lay upon him an awesome responsibility to maintain the illusions of other men.”

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

“I am telling you what I knowwords have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.”

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

“The literary experience extends impression into discourse. It flowers to thought with nouns, verbs, objects. It thinks. Film implodes discourse, it deliterates thought, it shrinks it to the compact...”

“Thus with continued concentration and the expenditure of enormous amounts of energy he tried to keep himself from slipping into the vast distances of his unhappiness. It was all around him. It was ...”

“The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates' name. And that is because Socrates' ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privi...”

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

“Poor Father, I see his final exploration. He arrives at the new place, his hair risen in astonishment, his mouth and eyes dumb. His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his arms spread in...”

“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.”

“I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a childs ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new things. He brought ho...”

“[Freud] "sat in his quiet cozy study in Vienna, glad to be back. He said to Ernest Jones, America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake. Ragtime”

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

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

“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.”