Quotes from E.L. Doctorow

I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.

I can assure you Ernest Hemingway was wrong when he said modern American literature began with Huckleberry Finn. It begins with Moby-Dick, the book that swallowed European civilization whole.

And why? Is our genius only in our wombs? Can we not write books and create learned scholarship and perform music and provide philosophical models for the betterment of mankind?

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

I take the position that true faith is not a supersessional knowledge. It cannot discard the intellect.

Where most people live, most of us, imagining it to be the real sunlit world when it is only a cave lit by the flickering fires of illusion.

Father looked at her and she was beautiful in the way she had been as a girl. He did not realize the pleasure he felt in having made her cry.

You want God? Don't look at Scripture, look everywhere, at the planets, the constellations, the universe. Look at a bug, a flea. Look at the manifold wonders of creation, including the Nazis. That's the kind of God you're dealing with.

The story was clearly over, as in juggling when the ball you throw up finds the moment to come down, hesitates as if it might not, and then drops at the same speed of that celestial light. And life is no longer good but just what you happen to be holding.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

Happiness consists of living in the dailiness of life and not knowing how happy you are. True happiness comes of not knowing you're happy.

I'm Homer, the blind brother.

She's some kind of Socialist-anarchist-anarcho-syndicalist-Communist. Unless you're one of them you can't tell exactly what any of them are.

Jacqueline, for how many days have I been without food. There was a crash, the whole house shook. Where is Langley? Where is my brother?

The ultimate technological achievement will be escaping from the mess we've made. There will be none after that because we will reproduce everything that we did on earth, we'll go through the whole sequence all over again somewhere else, and people will read my paper as prophecy, and know that having gotten off one planet, they will be able to destroy another with confidence.

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

I've had very little experience in my life. In fact, I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.

Orthodox devotions that do not let in the light of modern knowledge are no more than a form of ancestor worship.

Perhaps we all reappear, perhaps all our lives are impositions one on another.

What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies... Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.

So the Trustees of Ohio State were right in 1956 when they canned the English instructor for assigning Catcher in the Rye to his freshman class. They knew there is no qualitative difference between the kid who thinks it's funny to fart in chapel, and Che Guevara. They knew then Holden Caulfield would found SDS.

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.

To Morgan, the disfigurement of his monstrous nose was the touch of God upon him, the assurance of mortality. It was the steadiest assurance he had.