Don DeLillo Quotes

I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.

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

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.

I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it.

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

As belief shrinks from the world, it is more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.

The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now.

Everything I've stated may prove to be total poppycock.... Perhaps time will tell. Perhaps time will do nothing of the kind.

The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.

You live in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

Facts are lonely things.

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

A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next.

Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.

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.

The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you've killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it's ordinary murder.

Technology is lust removed from nature.

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.

I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let's not say men. Let's say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.

He said, "The word for moonlight is moonlight.

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled.

The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.

We need time to lose interest in things.

Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now.

Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first.

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

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.

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night.

What terrorists gain, novelists lose.

Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.

In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere.

It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line.

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.

There is a world inside the world.

Murray said, ´I don´t trust anybody´s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.´

Pain is just another form of information.

The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.

I've always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.

When I work I have a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words I'm making. I use a machine with larger than average letters: the bigger the better.

If an idea seems to find its way towards a stage setting, that's the direction I take. I don't know if I'm trying to achieve anything other than to follow an idea on to the page.