34 Quotes by E.L. Doctorow

Poor Father, I see his final exploration. He arrives at the new place, his hair risen in astonishment, his mouth and eyes dumb. His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his arms spread in pantomimic celebration, the immigrant, as in every moment of his life, arriving eternally on the shore of his Self.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.

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

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

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.

If there is a religious agency in our lives, it has to appear in the manner of our times. Not from on high, but a revelation that hides itself in our culture, it will be ground-level, on the street, it'll be coming down the avenue in the traffic, hard to tell apart from anything else.

Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.

But the institutional mind has only one mental operation: It abhors truth.