Don DeLillo Reality Quotations

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

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.

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 novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements.

It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams

American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.