E. L. Doctorow

Name: Conversations with E.L. Doctorow
ISBN: 9781578061433

Novelist

1931-01-06 – 2015-07-21

E. L. Doctorow was an American novelist best known for historical fiction including Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and The March. His work combined literary craft with American historical themes, and he received major national literary honors.

Books by E. L. Doctorow

Conversations with E.L. Doctorow
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Quotes by E. L. Doctorow

Here's how it goes: I'm up at the stroke of 10 or 10:30. I have breakfast and read the papers, and then it's lunchtime. Then maybe a little nap after lunch and out to the gym, and before I know it, it's time to have a drink.
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There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was 'The Adventures of Augie March' - the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was 'The U.S.A. Trilogy,' by John Dos Passos.
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Suffering isn't a moral endowment. People don't always do well under duress, and it seemed to me to be truer to a fellow in that situation to make him angry.
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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.
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From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on.
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It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
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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.
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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.
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Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.
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The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles.
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The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.
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Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world's commerce.
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I've had very little experience in my life. In fact, I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.
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Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.
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It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.
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A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.
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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.
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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.
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We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.
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The president we get is the country we get. With each new president the nation is conformed spiritually.
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