Don DeLillo Quotes

This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. - Murray (WN 285)

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

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

Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.

Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

In the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape.

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.

Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.

It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.

Freud is finished, Einstein's next.

Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.

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

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

When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.

And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.

Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts.

You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.

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

I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

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

It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.

I never wanted to change the world. Norman Mailer wanted to, he set himself the task of changing the consciousness of our age. And I think he came pretty close, in the 1960s, to actually managing to do it. But me? No, no, I never wanted anything like that. I'm not Maileresque.

Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is 'I know this feeling. I was here before'.

It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.

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.

The future belongs to crowds.

The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.

Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.

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

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?

holes are interesting. there are books about holes.

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

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".

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

Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake. And I'm the actor made up for the laying-out.

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.

These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.

A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.

I am very unmusical. I can't carry a tune. I would never be able to play an instrument.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending. So for much of the period in which I'm writing, I'm waiting to understand what's going to happen next, and how and where it's going to happen. In some cases, fairly early in the process, I do know how a book will end. But most of the time, not at all, and in this particular case, many questions are still unanswered, even though I've been working for months.

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

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

The music I like best is kind of frozen in my mind from the Sixties and Seventies. I still listen to the same jazz music I listened to when I was eighteen years old, and like and admire it just as much.

Terror is now the world narrative, unquestionably. When those two buildings were struck, and when they collapsed, it was, in effect, an extraordinary blow to consciousness, and it changed everything.