Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
E.L. DoctorowTags: writing
Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.
E.L. DoctorowIt was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.
E.L. DoctorowTags: chapter-15
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
E.L. DoctorowGood writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
E.L. DoctorowTags: show-not-tell
The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.
E.L. DoctorowWriting is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
E.L. DoctorowTags: quoted-by-wally-lamb
So the Trustees of Ohio State were right in 1956 when they canned the English instructor for assigning Catcher in the Rye to his freshman class. They knew there is no qualitative difference between the kid who thinks it's funny to fart in chapel, and Che Guevara. They knew then Holden Caulfield would found SDS.
E.L. DoctorowHis life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin. His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. He waved to the crowd. He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He escaped from a Siberian exile van. From a Chinese torture crucifix. From a Hamburg penitentiary. From an English prison ship. From a Boston jail. He was chained to automobile tires, water wheels, cannon, and he escaped. He dove manacled from a bridge into the Mississippi, the Seine, the Mersey, and came up waving. He hung upside down and strait-jacketed from cranes, biplanes and the tops of buildings. He was dropped into the ocean padlocked in a diving suit fully weighted and not connected to an air supply, and he escaped. He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued. Hurriedly, they dug him out. The earth is too heavy, he said gasping. His nails bled. Soil fell from his eyes. He was drained of color and couldn't stand. His assistant threw up. Houdini wheezed and sputtered. He coughed blood. They cleaned him off and took him back to the hotel. Today, nearly fifty years since his death, the audience for escapes is even larger.
E.L. DoctorowTags: chapter-i
No longer expecting to be beautiful and touched with grace till the end of her days, she was coming to the realization that whereas once, in his courtship, Father might have embodied the infinite possibilities of loving, he had aged and gone dull, made stupid, perhaps, by his travels and his work, so that more and more he only demonstrated his limits, that he had reached them, and that he would never move beyond them.
E.L. DoctorowPage 1 of 9.
next last »
Data privacy
Imprint
Contact
Diese Website verwendet Cookies, um Ihnen die bestmögliche Funktionalität bieten zu können.