Don DeLillo Quotes

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

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

Talent is more erotic when it's wasted.

I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.

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

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.

It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.

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.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

I felt myself getting whiter... What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in?

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

The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

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

A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.

The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.

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

She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn't working.

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

There are no amateurs in the world of children.

For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

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

Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.

If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours,man-hours, using labor more efficiently.

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.

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.

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

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.

Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.

Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.

To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity.

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

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

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

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.

Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?

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

Was she naked?" Lasher said. "To the waist," Cotsakis said. "From which direction?" Lasher said.

Technology and violence are interdependent.

That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.

I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore

Being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do.

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the sombre renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings.

Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.

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.