Don DeLillo Quotes

Certainly I've never tried to imagine what the future will hold. It's a hopeless endeavor to try to do such a thing.

Technology and violence are interdependent.

Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror. Today, the men who shape and inflence human consciousness are the terrorists.

Writers, some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren't noticed in the way that a writer might notice.

It's impossible to write about the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath without taking note of twenty-five years of paranoia which has collected around that event.

I marched and I protested against the war in Vietnam, along with many, many thousands of others. But I never quite understood the bombs that were placed in science labs or office buildings.

I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.

There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.

That's what in theory differentiates a writer from everyone else. You see and hear more clearly.

A writer decides to follow some ideas and not others for reasons that aren't always clear to him. It's often a matter of intuition.

Perhaps we've invented conspiracies for our own psychic well-being, to heal ourselves.

It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space.

I think my work is influenced by the fact that we're living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times.

I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.

I would never write in response to what I believe the public wanted or needed.

It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.

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

Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.

Fear is intense self-awareness.

Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.

I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

Money was spiritual indemnity against some unspecifiable future loss. It existed in purest form in his mind, my money, a reinforcing source of meditation.

Then they’re always trying to sell you something. Everything is based on forcing people to buy. If you can’t buy what they’re selling, you’re a zero in the system.

Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.

There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?

Only absences were fully shared.

I like simple men and complicated women.

Memory is the faculty of absolution. Men developed memories to ease their disquiet over things they did as men. The deep past is the only innocence and therefore necessary to retain.

What you see is not what wee se. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

Everybody wants to own the end of the world.

He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.

The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.

I am the false character that follows the name around.

All that incoherence. Selection, election, option, alternative. All behind him now. Codes and formats. Courses of action. Values, bias, predilection. Choice is a subtle form of disease.

We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identicalstructures.

God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the .45 to even things up.

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.

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

You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out" - Murray (WN 285).

Secrets are an exalted state, almost a dream state. They're a way of arresting motion, stopping the world so we can see ourselves in it.

Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?

If you could stretch a given minute, what would you find between its unstuck components? Probably some kind of astral madness. A bleak comprehension of the final size of things.

When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.

The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.

Everything was on television last night

This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track.

She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear.Eric Packer about Vija Kinski

The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings.

Vanity is a defensive quality. it contains an element of fear.