E. L. Doctorow Quotes - Page 4

I worry about images. Images are what things mean.

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

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.

I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.

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

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

I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a child’s ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new things. He brought home coconuts, papayas, mangoes, and urged them on our reluctant conservative selves. On Sundays he liked to discover new places, take us on endless bus or trolley rides to some new park or beach he knew about. He always counseled daring, in whatever situation, the courage to test the unknown, an instruction that was thematically in opposition to my mother’s.

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

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

Dad is always hiding in his book.

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

The images of things are not the things in themselves.

Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individual's calloused capacity to feel undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality.

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.

It is the immigrant hordes who keep this country alive, the waves of them arriving year after year.... Who believes in America more than the people who run down the gangplank and kiss the ground?

So that individuation may be compared to a pyramid in that it is only achieved by the placement of the top stone… The Jews, Ford said. They ain't like anyone else I know. There goes you theory up shits creek. He smiled.

When you're working well, you don't do research. Whatever you need comes to you.

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

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.

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 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.

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

Movies are too literal.