“ Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth. E.L. Doctorow
“ Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. E.L. Doctorow
“ 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 privileg… 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 pa… E.L. Doctorow
“ 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. E.L. Doctorow
“ 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, i… E.L. Doctorow
“ 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. E.L. Doctorow
“ Homer, maybe you can tell me why I am fatally attracted to women who are no more than mirrors of myself. E.L. Doctorow
“ It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them. E.L. Doctorow
“ 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. E.L. Doctorow
“ 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 l… E.L. Doctorow
“ 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. E.L. Doctorow
“ I cite too the ordinary fears of mortality the inspection of a fast-growing mole on the side of the nose blood in the stool a painful injury or the mournful witness of the slow death of a parent all t… E.L. Doctorow
“ Therefore the radical wastes his opportunity if he seriously considers the issues of his trial. If he is found guilty it is the ruling power's decision that he cannot be tolerated. If he is found inno… E.L. Doctorow
“ In those days, this was years for the sputnik thing, it was customary to downgrade the Russians' science. People who know something about those things didn't make that mistake. But at the level of Tim… E.L. Doctorow
“ 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… E.L. Doctorow
