E. L. Doctorow Quotes
Quotes to Explore
-
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
-
Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.
-
Only in your imagination can you revise.
-
What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.
-
People only see what they are prepared to see.
-
Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.
-
I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
-
Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.
-
Only votes talk, everything else walks.
-
A cat only has itself.
-
I love science fiction.
-
One movie is only one movie. I want to have a lifetime of making films.
-
When I was a teenager, my idol was the Dutch footballer Johan Cruyff. He's the only person I've ever asked for an autograph.
-
'The Wire' really drew on a lot of real-life situations and real-life organizations - it created fiction to make a social statement about reality.
-
When a system is stable, telling the worker about mistakes is only tampering.
-
Music my rampart, and my only one.
-
It is not only the living who are killed in war.
-
There is no writer's block in a newsroom. There's only unemployment block.
-
After the Dance was my first attempt at nonfiction. I'd never really participated in carnival, and I really wanted to go. It sounded like a wonderfully fun thing to do. And I wanted to write something happy about Haiti, something celebratory. And going to carnival gave me a chance to do that, because it is one of the instances in Haiti when people shed their class separation and come together.
-
Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
-
I'm comfortable only when there's a mutual attraction. That's what anyone wants. If I find out she's not attracted to me, it brings down my level of attraction to her. If I'm interested and find out she's not, I tend to cool off.
-
The Constitution's pretty clear. The Federalist papers are pretty clear... They very specifically delegated the power to declare war to Congress. They wanted this to be a congressional decision; they did not want war to be engaged in by the executive without approval of Congress.
-
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.
