Don DeLillo Quotes

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.

When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.

I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfilment in America.

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?

A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn't live his life in a certain way, this death is an introduction to an eternity of pain.

I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.

Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first.

That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.

Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.

I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography.

Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.

I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.

When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.

The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.

I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it.

I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?

American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.

There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.

In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next.

There are two categories of writers, it could be said: The author who is just a voice, and the one who is also creating a picture. I belong to the latter, because I have an acute visual sense.

It is interesting ... how weapons reflect the soul of the maker.

There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or 'terror in a lonely place', the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind.

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.

I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.

Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.

When I work I have a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words I'm making. I use a machine with larger than average letters: the bigger the better.

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of inter-communication is awe-inspiring.

The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.

I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.

You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is 'I know this feeling. I was here before'.

In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.

Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.

Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.

Isn't death the boundary we need?

Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.

Technology is lust removed from nature.

We need time to lose interest in things.

Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong. (Point Omega)

Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.

Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets.