Quotes from E.L. Doctorow

What Disneyland proposes is a technique of abbreviated shorthand culture for the masses, a mindless thrill, like an electric shock, that insists at the same time on the recipient's rich psychic relation to his country's history and language and literature. In a forthcoming time of highly governed masses in an overpopulated world, this technique may be extremely useful both as a substitute for education and, eventually, as a substitute for experience.

I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.

It was as if God had decreed this characterless engagement of brainless forces as his answer to the human presumption.

A person cannot live without looking for good signs, you just cannot do it, and I thought these signs were good.

Under the charge against us the normal rules of evidence are suspended. For us they don't exist.WE are charged not with committing espionage, but with conspiring to commit espionage. Since espionage itself does not have to be proved, no evidence is required that we have done anything. All that is required is evidence that we intended to do something. And what is this evidence? Coincidentally enough under the law the testimony of our so-called accomplice is considered evidence.

The experience of experience is untransmittable.

Consciousness without world is impossible, just as there is no sight without the light to see by. Is that your objection

We have to be wary of our brains. They make our decisions before we make them. They lead us to still waters. They renounceth free will. And it gets weirder: If you slice a brain down the middle, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere will operate self-sufficiently and not know what the other is doing.

the forms of life were volatile and that everything in the world could as easily be something else.

I am thus led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative...A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

The genome of every human cell has memory. You know what that means? As evolved beings we have in our genes memories of the far past, of long-ago generations, memories of experiences not our own.

And she understood as I did that when you sat down and put your hands on the keys, it was not just a piano in front of you, it was a universe.

I knew he was the real thing because when he laughed other men at the table laughed with him.

I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them. Carrying home his newspaper with your picture the laborer goes home to his wife, an exhausted workhorse with veins standing out in her legs, and he dreams not of justice but of being rich.

We had a joke, Langley and I: Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.

For a moment he thought the chair was aligned, but then he decided it was not. He moved it another turn to the right. He tried sitting in the chair now but it still felt peculiar. He turned it again. Eventually he made a complete circle and still he could not find the proper alignment for the chair.

And now I will tell of the revels that went on for three nights and two days in the brothel on West Seventy-sixth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues.

And to top everything he's got this problem he can't let her know how he feels: What-he's shy? Shy! Tell me who in this goddamn world is shy? Young, old, the lame and halt. Clobber you over the head with what they feel. Oh Man I wish just once in my long fucked-up life someone had come up to me who was too shy to tell me what they thought of me...

When the Great War came he would wage it with the fury of the affronted. Neither Theodore Roosevelt's son Quentin, who was to die in a dogfight over France, nor the old Bull Moose himself, who was to die in grief not long thereafter, would survive Wilson's abhorrence of war.

By the rules of evidence in this trial the verdict is foreordained. If the testimony ... is admitted as competent, the conspiracy is proved. Because it would not be admitted except under the assumption that a conspiracy existed.... Here ... a defendant can be found guilty of being brought to court as a defendant.

Suppose I could prove to you that there are universal patterns of order and repetition that give meaning to the activity of this planet. Suppose I could demonstrate that you yourself are an instrumentation in our modern age of trends

Implications of treason are fed like cubes of sugar to the twelve-headed animal which is justice. In ... opening remarks. In the way questions are asked. In support of lines of questioning where cases of treason are cited and the Judge endorses the relevance of the citation.

Why does there have to be promise before destruction?

The images of things are not the things in themselves.