Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours. - E.L. Doctorow
I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them. - E.L. Doctorow
A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins. - E.L. Doctorow
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing. - E.L. Doctorow
Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images. - E.L. Doctorow
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
The marriage seemed to flourish on Father’s extended absences. Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. - E.L. Doctorow
[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 - 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 privilege. - E.L. Doctorow