E.L. Doctorow Quotes

9.01 Nausea catalogs the indigestible contents of the stomach that are to be brought up.
9.02 Memory that is nauseating catalogs the contents of the mind that can never be brought up.

It is the immigrant hordes who keep this country alive, the waves of them arriving year after year ... Who believes in America more than the people who run down the gangplank and kiss the ground?

Movies are too literal.

Suffering isn't a moral endowment. People don't always do well under duress, and it seemed to me to be truer to a fellow in that situation to make him angry.

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

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.

A writer's life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure's bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen ... Except the act of writing.

The important thing is not to be too comfortable when you're writing. Noise in the street? That's good. The computer goes down? That's good. All these things are good. It has to be a little bit of a struggle.

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.

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.

The bad news is that if we do in fact get off the earth we will contaminate the rest of the universe with our moral insufficiency.

His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin. His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. He waved to the crowd. He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He escaped from a Siberian exile van. From a Chinese torture crucifix. From a Hamburg penitentiary. From an English prison ship. From a Boston jail. He was chained to automobile tires, water wheels, cannon, and he escaped. He dove manacled from a bridge into the Mississippi, the Seine, the Mersey, and came up waving. He hung upside down and strait-jacketed from cranes, biplanes and the tops of buildings. He was dropped into the ocean padlocked in a diving suit fully weighted and not connected to an air supply, and he escaped. He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued. Hurriedly, they dug him out. The earth is too heavy, he said gasping. His nails bled. Soil fell f

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 ...

For instance, with "Ragtime" I was so desperate to write something, I was facing the wall of my study in my house in New Rochelle and so I started to write about the wall. That's the kind of day we sometimes have, as writers. Then I wrote about the house that was attached to the wall. It was built in 1906, you see, so I thought about the era and what Braodviw Avenue looked like then: trolley cars ran along the avenue down at the bottom of the hill; people wore white clothes in summer to stay cool. Teddy Roosevelt was president. One thing led to another and that's the way that book began: through desperation to those few images ... - 92nd Street YMHA Interview

The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.

My father was the proprietor of a music shop on Forty-third Street, where many of the finest performers and musicians of the day would come to shop. He knew the classical repertoire inside out.

Planning to write is not writing.

My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better.

...if justice cannot be made to operate under the worst possible conditions of social hysteria, what does it matter how it operates at other times?

It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them.

When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it.

The theory for admitting accomplice testimony that is uncorroborated is that conspiracy is by its nature secretive and that only the parties to it can know it occurred. But in practice this means the accomplice's guilt is modified to the degree that he can convict the defendant.

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.

So: after all, we may with assurance say only the following about the Old One's universe: that nothing is constant other than the speed of light. Of space all we may say with assurance is that it is something you measure with a ruler. And of time all we may say is that it is something you measure with a clock. But for the theological visions and screams and terrors this produces in our brains, I beg you do not hold me responsible.

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.

To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving.

I discovered Einstein said the same thing about his celebrated theories of relativity that writers say about their work when he said he didn't have any feelings of personal possession of these ideas. Once they were out there, they came from somewhere else. And that's exactly the feeling when you write. You don't feel possessive about it.

Nobody doan never have touch Porhl! When I little, de brudder try. Oh yeah. I raise up dis bony knee hard in his what he got dere, and dat were dat and nobody since! You hear dis gul, Mr. free man Jacob Early? And nobody since! An I ain't no Jez'bel, she screamed. In this way was Pearl's decision made, and by the time they were on the march through Milledgeville she was drummer for Clarke's company. She just hit the drum once every other step and they kept the pace, some with smiles on their faces. She looked straight ahead and kept her shoulders squared against the shoulder straps, but she could tell that white folks watched from the windows. And none of them knew she wasn't but the drummer boy they saw.

[The way I work] is like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

(The Paris Review, Winter 1986, No. 101)

Dad is always hiding in his book.

Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

A stydy today of the products of the animated cartoon industry of the twenties, thirties and forties would yield the following theology: 1. People are animals. 2. The body is mortal and subject to incredible pain. 3. Life is antagonistic to the living. 4. The flesh can be sawed, crushed, frozen, stretched, burned, bombed, and plucked for music. 5. The dumb are abused by the smart and the smart are destroyed by their own cunning. 6. The small are tortured by the large and the large destroyed by their own momentum. 7. We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who's lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?

The marriage seemed to flourish on Father's extended absences. " Ragtime

There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was 'The Adventures of Augie March' - the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was 'The U.S.A. Trilogy,' by John Dos Passos.

I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.

Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.

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.

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

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

We dress them [children] in the presumptions of the world. They are the bright small face of hope. They are the last belief we have, the belief in making them believe.

It's a kind of jail, the brain's mind. We've got these mysterious three-pound brains and they jail us.

When crime was working as it was supposed to it was very dull. Very lucrative and very dull.

I got married very early, and in no time at all, we had three children. And it seemed to me I had an obligation to support them.

I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.

All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates' name. And that is because Socrates' ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege.

I don't think anything I've written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years to write a book. 'World's Fair' was an exception. It seemed to be a particularly fluent book as it came. I did it in seven months. I think what happened in that case is that God gave me a bonus book.

Uncharged with invisible meaning, the visible is nothing, mere clay; and without visible circumstance, a territory, to connect to, our spirit is shapeless, nameless, and undefined.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

God has raised his hand to give us respite. It could be he has something more in mind for us. With this time on our hands, we should try to figure out what it could be. Because HE don't do pointless acts of charity.

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

A message of consolation to Greek brothers in their prison camps, and to my Haitian brothers and Nicaraguan brothers and Dominican brothers and South African brothers and Spanish brothers and to my brothers in South Vietnam, all in their prison camps: You are in the free world!

Here's how it goes: I'm up at the stroke of 10 or 10:30. I have breakfast and read the papers, and then it's lunchtime. Then maybe a little nap after lunch and out to the gym, and before I know it, it's time to have a drink.

Somehow he had catapulted himself beyond the world's value system. But this very fact lay upon him an awesome responsibility to maintain the illusions of other men.

Support of the Mexican Revolution. He hadn't known

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.

Ever since this day I have dreamt sometimes ... I, a street rat in my soul, dream even now ... that if it were possible to life this littered, paved Manhattan from the earth ... and all its torn and dripping pipes and conduits and tunnels and tracks and cables
all of it, like a scab from new skin underneath
how seedlings would sprout and freshets bubble up, and brush and grasses would grow over the rolling hills ...

Truth is, I just shrug and soldier on. As kind as I am, as well-meaning and helpful as I try to be, I have no feelings finally, for good or ill. In the depths of my being, no matter what happens, I am left cold, impenetrable to remorse, to grief, to happiness, though I can pretend well enough even to the point of fooling myself. I am trying to say I am finally, terribly, unfeeling. My soul resides in a still, deep, beautiful, emotionless, calm cold pond of silence.

I have a number of vices, one of which is moderation.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

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 experience of experience is untransmittable.

Banks and churches and courtrooms all depend on the appurtenances of theatre. On illusion. Banks, the illusion of stability and honourable dealings to the rot and corruption of capitalist exploitation. Churches the illusion of sacred sanctuary of purposes of pacifying social discontent. Courtrooms of course designed to promote the illusion of solemn justice. If there was true justice why would such trappings be necessary? Wouldn't a table and chairs and an ordinary room serve just as well?

Most people are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it were not their own.

19. I wrote in my notebook that even if all the possible scientific questions are answered, our problem is still not touched at all.

Emily supposed the modern world was fortunate in the progress of science. But she could not help but feel at this moment the impropriety of male invasiveness. She knew he was working to save this poor woman, but in her mind, too, was a sense of Wrede's science as adding to the abuse committed by his fellow soldiers. He said not a word. It was as if the girl were no more than the surgical challenge she offered.

I asked this question: How can I think about my brain when it's my brain doing the thinking? So is this brain pretending to be me thinking about it?

The images of things are not the things in themselves.

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.

Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.

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?

It has taken time and the blundering wisdom and anarchic greed of our ancestry to construct the modern city of consolidated institutions. It is a great historically amassed communal creation. If you fly above it at night, it is a jeweled wonder of the universe, floating like a giant liner on the sea of darkness. It is smart, accomplished, sophisticated, and breathtakingly beautiful. And it glimmers and sparkles as all things breakable glimmer and sparkle. You wonder how much God had to do with this, how much of the splendor and insolence of the modern city creatively built from the disparate intentions of generations of men comes of the inspiration of God. Because it is the city of the unremarked God, the sometime-thing God, the God of history.

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.

Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.

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

Communists have no respect for people, only for positions.

The literary experience extends impression into discourse. It flowers to thought with nouns, verbs, objects. It thinks. Film implodes discourse, it deliterates thought, it shrinks it to the compacted meaning of the preverbal impression or intuition or understanding. You receive what you see, you don't have to think it out ... Fiction goes everywhere, inside, outside, it stops, it goes, its action can be mental. Nor is it time-driven. Film is time-driven, it never ruminates, it shows the outside of life, it shows behavior. It tends to the simplest moral reasoning. Films out of Hollywood are linear. The narrative simplification of complex morally consequential reality is always the drift of a film inspired by a book. Novels can do anything in the dark horrors of consciousness. Films do close-ups, car drive-ups, places, chases and explosions.

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.

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.

But I can stop on any corner at the intersection of two busy streets, and before me are thousands of lives headed in all four directions, uptown downtown east and west, on foot, on bikes, on in-line skates, in buses, strollers, cars, trucks, with the subway rumble underneath my feet ... and how can I not know I am momentarily part of the most spectacular phenomenon in the unnatural world? ... The city may begin from a marketplace, a trading post, the confluence of waters, but it secretly depends on the human need to walk among strangers.

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.

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.

There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.

One day you stepped in snow, the next in mud, water soaked in your boots and froze them at night, it was the next worst thing to pure blizzardry, it was weather that wouldn't let you settle.

Langley would never complete his newspaper project. I knew that and I'm sure he knew it as well. It was a crazy foolish hand-rubbing scheme that kept his mind in the mood he liked to be in.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

I have been everywhere because I don't know what I'm looking for.

And why is Grant so solemn today upon our great achievement, except he knows this unmeaning inhuman planet will need our warring imprint to give it value, and that our civil war, the devastating manufacture of the bones of our sons, is but a war after a war, a war before a war.

One evening he appeared with an infant in his arms at the door of his ex-wife, Martha. Because Briony, his lovely young wife after Martha, had died. Of what? We'll get to that. I can't do this alone, Andrew said, as Martha stared at him from the open doorway. It happened to have been snowing that night, and Martha was transfixed by the soft creature-like snowflakes alighting on Andrew's NY Yankees hat brim. Martha was like that, enrapt by the peripheral things as if setting them to music. Even in ordinary times, she was slow to respond, looking at you with her large dark rolling protuberant eyes. Then the smile would come, or the nod, or the shake of the head. Meanwhile the heat from her home drifted through the open door and fogged up Andrew's eyeglasses. He stood there behind his foggy lenses like a blind man in the snowfall and was without volition when at last she reached out, gently took the swaddled infant from him, stepped back, and closed the door in his face.

A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can do geography, as Faulkner did, or you can dwell on a particular period. It provides the same framework.

[Freud] "sat in his quiet cozy study in Vienna, glad to be back. He said to Ernest Jones, America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake." Ragtime

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

There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.

The businessmen wondered if they could create such individuals not from the accidents of news events but from the deliberate manufactures of their own medium.

-Of course movies today no longer require film. They are recorded and held in digital suspension as ones and zeroes. And so at the moment the last remaining piece of the world is lit and shot for a movie, there will be another Big Bang ... and the multitudes of ones and zeroes will be strewn through the universe as particles that act like waves ... until, shaken by borealic winds or ignited by solar flares or otherwise galvanized by this or that heavenly signal, they compose themselves into brilliant constellations that shine in full color across the night sky of a remote planet ... where a reverent, unrecognizable form of life will look up from its rooftops at the faces of Randolph Scott, Gail Russell, George Brent, Linda Darnell ... to name just a few of the stars.