Don DeLillo Quotes

I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.

Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.

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.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

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.

Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.

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.

People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It's simply how we live.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

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

Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera? Because our lives are a vivid situation.

Naturally a direct comparison of terrorist and novelist is complete nonsense. But there was once a time when the novelist also had some influence on how his contemporaries thought, the way they saw the world, the way they lived.

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

Off-camera lives are unverifiable.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.

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.

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.

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

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

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.

If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

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

Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals.

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

I do think that in the near future, if it hasn't happened already, people will be able to use technology to design their own novels, perhaps with individuals themselves as the main character. In other words, everything is being individualized and narrowed.

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.

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.

We feel certain that the extraterrestrial message is a mathematical code of some kind. Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality.

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

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be.

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.

The world isn't going to be destroyed, but you don't feel safe anymore in your plane or train or office or auditorium.

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

why something and not nothing? why music and not noise?

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

When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.

Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.

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.

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

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? (155)

Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.