Don DeLillo Thinking Quotations

I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?

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

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.

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

I think my work is influenced by the fact that we're living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

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.

I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.

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

I think that the massive, overarching, interconnected systems of technology tend to make us a little insecure, somewhat pliable, and susceptible to half-beliefs.

There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.

To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.

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

We don't really know how technology will affect narrative. That's the question. See, people used to say that the novel is going to die, but they would never say that movies will die with it, when in fact all forms depend on the narrative. I think if one of them fails, the others are going to fail as well. Maybe this will happen to both forms, and maybe movies will take a totally different direction with fiction.

I do think that in the near future, if it hasn't happened already, people will be able to use technology to design their own novels, perhaps with individuals themselves as the main character. In other words, everything is being individualized and narrowed.

The world is shrinking into a kind of technological funnel. I think people are drawn into their technological devices, and this becomes a kind of subjective universe, into which much of the rest of the world simply does not enter.

I think silence is the condition you accept as the judgment on your crimes.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

Famous people don't want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there's something crawling in their clothes.

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.

The best moments involve a loss of control. It's a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often - completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages - I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.

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

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.

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.

When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.

Because friends have to be brutally honest with each other. I'd feel terrible if I didn't tell you what I was thinking, especially at a time like this

There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.

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.

He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.

People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It's simply how we live.

Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.