Don DeLillo Book Quotations

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

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

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.

The difference between the world of pictures and the world of printed matter is extraordinary and hard to define. A picture is like the masses: a multitude of impressions. A book on the other hand, with its linear advance of words and characters seems to be connected to individual identity.

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

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.

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

In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary from book to book. But in many books, there is a colloquialism of address. The characters will speak in a quite idiosyncratic way sometimes.

holes are interesting. there are books about holes.

The language of my books has shaped me as a man.