E. L. Doctorow Quotes

A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.

Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

The one who tells the stories rules.

Those who tell the stories rule society.

The truth is undeniable. You tell somebody the truth, it's undeniable.

He who cannot exaggerate is not qualified to utter truth.

Marianne was silent; it was impossible for her to say what she did not feel, however trivial the occasion.

For truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times and in all sorts.

Every Gag I tell must be based on truth. No matter how much I may exaggerate it, it must have a certain amount of Truth.... Now Rumor travels Faster, but it don't stay put as long as Truth.

So, I think that's the centerpiece of morality: Don't lie. But to do that, you have to go a step further and find out what the truth is.

In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have any other tie upon another, but by our word.

Lying is the strongest acknowledgement of the force of truth.

Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. Even with no motive to be false, it is very hard to say the exact truth.

Where there is truth, there also is knowledge which is true.

One cannot reach Truth by untruthfulness. Truthful conduct alone can reach truth.

Writing can teach us the dignity of speaking the truth.

Veracity is the heart of morality.

How can Benedict Arnold be reliable in what he says?

Some people are under the impression that all that is required to make a good fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and without blushing; but this is a mistake. Mere bald fabrication is useless; the veriest tyro can manage that. It is in the circumstantial detail, the embellishing touches of probability, the general air of scrupulous - almost of pedantic - veracity, that the experienced angler is seen.

When I am giving the relation of a thing, remember to abstain from altering either in the matter or manner of speaking, so much, as that, if every one, afterwards, should alter as much, it would at last come to be properly false.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the story isn't true, ... But what it does mean, then, is that at this moment we simply do not have enough evidence, in my view, for any conclusion to be reached - that the presidents have been lying to us for all these years and that what we've been told was just a pack of lies.

When Wine enters, out goes the Truth.

"True" resembles... a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit in with other sentences which are doing so.

Never tell a lie-except for practice.

It's only a story, isn't it?"... "Who's to say what's only a story and what's truth disguised as a story?