L. Doctorow Quotes (6 Quotes)

You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

It seemed to me so much more sensible to make something up than go through the tedious business of interviewing someone. I was just a kid and so maybe I was scared that no one would want to talk to me. And I figured that if there wasn't a Carl the doorman, there should have been.

Its glory is all moonshine.

He was a brilliant man, a complex man. The march justified him as a military man, but he had a great deal of guilt about it, and when the war was over he immediately left his troops and went down to do rescue-and-recovery operations. He wanted to rehabilitate the people he'd been destroying and dispossessing.

The wretched war had destroyed not only their country but all their presumptions of human self-regard. What a scant, foolish pretense was a family, a culture, a place in history, when it was all so easily defamed. And God was behind this.

So what this is is a 'road novel.' Eventually entire civilization (in the South) had been uprooted and people found security only in movement, ... That interested me enormously ... A friend from New Orleans, he said when he read the book, 'This is like Hurricane Katrina.'