E. L. Doctorow Quotes

Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

The belief may be too often mistaken, but the illusion of coming into direct contact with the past is intoxicating and persuasive, and can result in an interpretation that carries conviction. Sometimes confidence is all that's needed.

Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.

It is faith that moves mountains, because it gives the illusion that mountains move …. Illusion is perhaps the only reality in life.

I like illusion when it is so convincing that we might as well see reality this way - I like to present to our belief system something that is convincing, that 'we know not to be.'

How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.

You must remember, my dear lady, the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it.

He had a certain air of being a handsome man-which he was not; and a certain air of being a well-bred man-which he was not. It was mere swagger and challenge; but in this particular, as in many others, blustering assertion goes for proof, half over the world.

What's the main thing that makes magic magic? The fact that no one believes that it's possible.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

A thing can only live through a pious illusion.

I want to be the rock that floats.

I think people are more apt to believe photographs, especially if it’s something fantastic. They’re willing to be more gullible. Sometimes they want fantasy. Even if they know it’s fake they can believe anything. People are accustomed to being told what to believe in.

We can't believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can't love what we believe to be unreal.

The truth is still the truth whether or not you believe it. Can we say the same about lies? No, lies only exist because we believe them. If we don't believe in lies, they simply disappear.

Faith actually moves no mountains, but instead raises them up where there were none before.

Just because it's a dream doesn't mean it's a lie.

The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.

If on the other hand he went to pay his respects to The Door and it wasn't there . . . what then? The answer, of course, was very simple. He had a whole board of circuits for dealing with exactly this problem, in fact this was the very heart of his function. He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief? The Door would still be there, even if the Door was not.

Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains, although I do not know who assumed that it could. But it can put mountains where there are none.

The notion that as a man grows older his illusions leave him is not quite true. What is true is that his early illusions are supplanted by new, and to him, equally convincing illusions.

Magic is not inherently anything. It is what you sell it as.

We are as often duped by diffidence as by confidence.

The gods are blind. And men see only what they wish" - Tyrion Lannister

A firm belief atthracts facts. They come out iv holes in the ground an' cracks in th' wall to support belief, but they run away fr'm doubt.