E. L. Doctorow Quotes

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.

E. L. Doctorow

• Writing
• Myself
• Trust

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Quotes to Explore

• What brought mass innovation to a nation was not scientific advances - its own or others' - but 'economic dynamism': the desire and the space to innovate.

  

  Edmund Phelps
  • Desire
  • Space
  • Innovation

• In real life, I'm gorgeous, beautiful.

  

  Rachel Dratch
  • Life
  • Real
  • Beautiful

• Some people ask, 'How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?' I say, 'My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.'

  

  Mahmoud Darwish
  • People
  • Different
  • Change

• Part of Michael's uniqueness, I think, comes from the fact that he worked with music. He had a tape which he gave me with many different compositions, really eclectic. These pieces of music were sources of inspiration.

  

  Madeleine Stowe
  • Music
  • Inspiration
  • Uniqueness

• By taking responsibility for how you choose to respond to anything or anyone, you're aligning yourself with the beautiful dance of life.

  

  Wayne Dyer
  • Life
  • Beautiful
  • Responsibility

• To me, there's no point in writing merely to entertain.

  

  Bebe Moore Campbell
  • Writing
  • Point
  • Entertain

• If I'm offered a good case in Florida or a good case somewhere else, South Florida will win every time.

  

  F. Lee Bailey
  • Time
  • Good
  • Win

• The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

  

  Samuel Johnson
  • More
  • Fortune
  • Pity

• I almost laughed about the Machiavellian plans of the presidents of the United States.

  

  Fidel Castro
  • United States
  • Plans
  • Almost

• No offense to music - thank you for Entertainer of the Year and all that stuff. But if you're a father or a mother, there's nothing that beats being a parent, and that's the best time of my life right there.

  

  Garth Brooks
  • Life
  • Time
  • Music

• I often tell people when you make a mistake, you not only hurt yourself, but you hurt the ones that love you.

  

  Magic Johnson
  • People
  • Love
  • Hurt

• For the Negro, Andrew Johnson did less than nothing when once he realized that the chief beneficiary of labor and economic reform in the South would be freedmen. His inability to picture Negroes as men made him oppose efforts to give them land; oppose national efforts to educate them; and above all things, oppose their rights to vote.

  

  W. E. B. Du Bois
  • Men
  • Picture
  • Vote

• You know, there's always someone in mind when I'm writing. You know, it's all comes from somewhere inside.

  

  Dan Auerbach The Black Keys
  • Writing
  • Mind
  • Know

• In the time I spent with him, Jurgen Klopp was enigmatic, larger than life, and extremely quick-witted. He is quite unique as a football manager in many ways, and that is what makes him so entertaining.

  

  Gary Lineker
  • Life
  • Time
  • Football

• I knew the ribosome was going to be the focus of Nobel prizes. It stands at the crossroads of biology, between the gene and what comes out of the gene. But I had convinced myself I was not going to be a winner.

  

  Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
  • Focus
  • Myself
  • Winner

• Frankly speaking, it's only the script that matters to me the most. If I like the script, then I just commit to myself and go ahead with it. But I also look at the commitment and confidence of the director of the film because it's him who will shape the film.

  

  Vidya Balan
  • Film
  • Confidence
  • Commitment

• I don't think that my work is very moralistic - at least, I try to avoid that. I grew up with that sermonising tendency, and I don't think visual work operates like that.

  

  Kara Walker
  • Up
  • Work
  • Think

• Based on a lifetime of observations and a few decades in the markets, I understand that societies, beliefs and fashions all move in long arcs of time. We call these arcs several things: cycles, periods, eras.

  

  Barry Ritholtz
  • Time
  • Long
  • Understand

• I know too much to be a sceptic and too little to be a dogmatist.

  

  Pierre Bayle

• We're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.

  

  Marge Piercy
  • School
  • Sex
  • Dumb

• My mum was a wonderful mother. She died, aged 80, of Alzheimer's disease, which was dreadful to watch. I remember she said to me: 'Believe in yourself because no one else is going to do it for you.' I'm sure a lot of my success is due to her words of advice.

  

  Bonnie Tyler
  • Believe
  • She
  • Remember

• When you're writing for a show, you're writing part of the script. You have to tell the story.

  

  Adam Schlesinger
  • Writing

• Being sexy is kind of funny to me. You know, I can get kind of spunky or I can get tough, you know, that kind of tough, sexy look. But sexy? No, I don't think so.

  

  Reba McEntire
  • Funny
  • Sexy

• One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.

  

  E. L. Doctorow
  • Writing
  • Myself
  • Trust