162 Quotes by E. L. Doctorow

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.

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.

A book is not complete until it’s read.

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 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.

All writers are unaffiliated. The novelist, the poet, will understand the institutions they live within, including their religious traditions, as aggregate historically amended fictions. Appointing themselves as witnesses, they are necessarily independent of all institutions, including the institution of the family-which may be why nothing makes family members more nervous than the discovery that one of them is a writer.

Happiness consists of living in the dailyness of life and not knowing how happy you are. True happiness comes of not knowing you’re happy, it’s an animal serenity, something between contentment and joy, a steadiness of the belonged self in the world.

And when a song is good, a standard, we recognize it as expressing a truth. Like a formula, it can apply to everyone, not just the singer.

I keep thinking someone will come by sometime who will want to use the wood.