The literary experience extends impression into discourse. It flowers to thought with nouns, verbs, objects. It thinks. Film implodes discourse, it deliterates thought, it shrinks it to the compacted meaning of the preverbal impression or intuition or understanding. You receive what you see, you don't have to think it out. Fiction goes everywhere, inside, outside, it stops, it goes, its action can be mental. Nor is it time-driven. Film is time-driven, it never ruminates, it shows the outside of life, it shows behavior. It tends to the simplest moral reasoning. Films out of Hollywood are linear. The narrative simplification of complex morally consequential reality is always the drift of a film inspired by a book. Novels can do anything in the dark horrors of consciousness. Films do close-ups, car drive-ups, places, chases and explosions. E.L. Doctorow
Some Similar Quotes
  1. It starts so young, and I'm angry about that. The garbage we're taught. About love, about what's "romantic." Look at so many of the so-called romantic figures in books and movies. Do we ever stop and think how many of them would cause serious and... - Deb Caletti

  2. The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues. - Terry Pratchett

  3. That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox. - Nicole Krauss

  4. Only the gentle are ever really strong. - James Dean

  5. The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. - Alfred Hitchcock

More Quotes By E.L. Doctorow
  1. Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.

  2. Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.

  3. Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.

  4. Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

  5. Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.

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