E. L. Doctorow Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
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Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.
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Only in your imagination can you revise.
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What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.
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People only see what they are prepared to see.
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Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.
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I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
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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.
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Only votes talk, everything else walks.
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A cat only has itself.
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One movie is only one movie. I want to have a lifetime of making films.
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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.
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'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.
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When a system is stable, telling the worker about mistakes is only tampering.
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Music my rampart, and my only one.
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It is not only the living who are killed in war.
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Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.
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I remember reading an interview with a writer who said that in nonfiction if you have one lie it sort of messes it up. But in fiction the real details give you so much more credibility, because people do so much research just to write fiction. In fiction you're trying to recreate something lifelike.
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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.
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Only a minority of science fiction dystopias attempt to plumb the real existential roots of oppression, the flaws in humanity's nature that undermine our best attempts at organizing ourselves into social units.
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Nobody wants to be against technology, but I think that regulators should not - and people should not - assume that faster is always better in markets. We need to question technology to insure that markets continue to perform their fundamental purposes.
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Far away, I could hear them lapping up my brains. Like Macbeth's witches, the three lithe cats surrounded my broken head, slurping up that thick soup inside. The tips of their rough tongues licked the soft folds of my mind. And with each lick my consciousness flickered like a flame and faded away.
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There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.
