E. L. Doctorow Quotes

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

Everything resembles the truth, everything can happen to a man.

The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.

A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings.

Consciousness in the individual is that area where the totality of life is located.

The physical body is conceived and constructed in consciousness as are time and space. All happens within our self.

Our body is the place that our memories and dreams call home for the time being.

Life is brief, even at its longest. Whatever you are going to do with your life, get at it. All good will be attacked. All values must be defended. In all areas of the human existence, what we put into this world, we get back from it.

Life belongs to man, but the meaning of life is beyond him.

Il n'y a pas d'autre univers qu'un univers humain, l'univers de la subjectivite humaine. There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity.

How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren't real?

Every person who has ever lived has lived an unbroken succession of unique occasions.

Time and space are just projections of your consciousness.

We are never aware of the present; each instant of living becomes perceptible only when it is past, so that in a sense we do not live at all, but only remember living.

Wherever comes man comes tragedy and comedy also.

Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.

We’re all tourists, sort of. Life is tourism, sort of. As far as I’m concerned, the dinosaurs still hold the lease on this godforsaken rock.

[H]appy or miserable, life is the only blessing which man possesses[.

Reality is the completion of experience.

A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.

What is our life? A play of passion. Our mirth the music of division. Our mother's wombs the tyring houses be, Where we are drest for this short Comedy.

A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.

Being is seeing in the human dimension.

The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.

With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.