Don DeLillo Quotes

Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?' What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing

Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.

Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.

Words are not necessary to one's experience of the true life.

People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.

He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.

Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.

All human existence is a trick of light.

The more things I threw away, the more I found.

Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets.' (20)

I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.

I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.

Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into the night, if you stand a while and look.

We surrounded ourselves with smoke and loud noise. That's the way we chose to live. I'm prepared to defend it.

World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.

days like this. i look at you and feel electric. tell me you don't feel it too."_Eric Packer

There are no amateurs in the world of children.

Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.

The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. (Point Omega)

The term itself--my life--is a desperate overstatement.

Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.

What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.

He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.

Evil is movement towards void.

Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now.

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.

You gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.

It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at.

Famous people don't want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there's something crawling in their clothes.

You become a serious novelist by living long enough.

We commit our crimes at night and reveal ourselves in the high noon of studio lights.

One of my earliest memories as a reader - I don't know how old I was, quite young - was a poem of his, called "Fog," and I remember the first verse, "The fog comes / on little cat feet".

I don't consider myself paranoid at all. I think I see things exactly as they are.

I was never either pro-culture or counter-culture. I was in a kind of middle state.

You live in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God.

The family was an art ... and the dinner table was the place it found expression.

...Because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond necessity.

Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.

I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let's not say men. Let's say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.

The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.

The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.

When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don't have an audience; I have a set of standards.

A dead afternoon in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.

Digital clocks took the 'space' out of time.

Everything I've stated may prove to be total poppycock.... Perhaps time will tell. Perhaps time will do nothing of the kind.

In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere.

One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness.