"I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad"
About this Quote
Doctorow’s line plays like a deadpan confession from someone who’s made a career out of turning lived pain into art, then quietly admitting he’d rather skip the raw materials. The wit is in the inversion: “experience” is supposed to be the credential, the thing that deepens character, the earnest advice pinned to every graduation speech. Doctorow flips it into a hazard, almost an avoidable workplace injury.
The intent feels two-pronged. On the surface, it’s gallows humor: life, taken as a sequence of events that happen to your body and ego, is largely unpleasant. But the subtext is craft. Novelists are professional experiencers in the secondhand sense: they research, imagine, listen, reconstruct. Doctorow’s best work often mines history and public catastrophe, which suggests a writer deeply interested in experience as subject matter, not necessarily as personal rite of passage. He’s skeptical of the romantic idea that suffering is morally improving or artistically necessary.
“Most experience is bad” is also a neat, blunt summary of the 20th century’s disillusionment. Doctorow came up in a period when politics, war, and mass media made private life feel porous to larger forces. In that context, the line reads less like cowardice than triage: avoid the avoidable damage; let imagination do the dangerous traveling. The joke lands because it refuses the culture’s sanctification of hardship while still acknowledging its grim abundance.
The intent feels two-pronged. On the surface, it’s gallows humor: life, taken as a sequence of events that happen to your body and ego, is largely unpleasant. But the subtext is craft. Novelists are professional experiencers in the secondhand sense: they research, imagine, listen, reconstruct. Doctorow’s best work often mines history and public catastrophe, which suggests a writer deeply interested in experience as subject matter, not necessarily as personal rite of passage. He’s skeptical of the romantic idea that suffering is morally improving or artistically necessary.
“Most experience is bad” is also a neat, blunt summary of the 20th century’s disillusionment. Doctorow came up in a period when politics, war, and mass media made private life feel porous to larger forces. In that context, the line reads less like cowardice than triage: avoid the avoidable damage; let imagination do the dangerous traveling. The joke lands because it refuses the culture’s sanctification of hardship while still acknowledging its grim abundance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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