Don DeLillo Quotes

I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.

In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are.

The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements.

America was and is the immigrant's dream.

There is no lie in war or preparation of war that can't be defended.

Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S. Why not use it?

America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.

I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.

Freud is finished, Einstein's next.

He said, "The word for moonlight is moonlight.

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.

Off-camera lives are unverifiable.

Explain me to myself, you’ll make me choke on my lunch. Feel sympathy for me, I’ll puke monkey blood on your understated shoes.

Music is dangerous in so many ways. It's the most dangerous thing in the world.

I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become.

Rushdie is a hostage.

Because friends have to be brutally honest with each other. I'd feel terrible if I didn't tell you what I was thinking, especially at a time like this

Hardship makes the world obscure.

I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.

There's never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President.

I think that the massive, overarching, interconnected systems of technology tend to make us a little insecure, somewhat pliable, and susceptible to half-beliefs.

There are times when you want to stop working at faith and just be washed in a blowing wind that tells you everything.

War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.

All who have their reward on Earth, the fruits Of painful superstition and blind zeal, Naught seeking but the praise of men, here find Fit retribution, empty as their deeds.

It's not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.

I think silence is the condition you accept as the judgment on your crimes.

People will always make comparisons.

The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.

Some people fake their death, I'm faking my life.

The dead have a presence.

Time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find... The future becomes insistent.

People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.

Look past the violence. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.

The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there,' she said. 'This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.

If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.

Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it.

Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.

Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.

Let's enjoy the aimless days while we still can.

How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?

For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

There is a world inside the world.

the instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms

Talent is more erotic when it's wasted.

Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.

I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.

There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require.