Don DeLillo Quotations

It occured to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

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

May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

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?

I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.

In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.

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?

Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.

I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.

When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.

I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.

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

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

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

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

Thousands stand and chant. Around them in the world, people ride escalators going up and sneak secret glances at the faces coming down. People dangle teabags over hot water in white cups. Cars run silently on the autobahns, streaks of painted light. People sit at desks and stare at office walls. They smell their shirts and drop them in the hamper. People bind themselves into numbered seats and fly across time zones and high cirrus and deep night, knowing there is something they've forgotten to do.

As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.

The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.

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.

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

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

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.

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.

There are two categories of writers, it could be said: The author who is just a voice, and the one who is also creating a picture. I belong to the latter, because I have an acute visual sense.

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

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?

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.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.

Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.

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.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

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 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.

If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

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

Longing on a large scale makes history.

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

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.

I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.

If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

I marched and I protested against the war in Vietnam, along with many, many thousands of others. But I never quite understood the bombs that were placed in science labs or office buildings.

That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.

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.

Pain is just another form of information.

I was never either pro-culture or counter-culture. I was in a kind of middle state.

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

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.

People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units.

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

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

The world isn't going to be destroyed, but you don't feel safe anymore in your plane or train or office or auditorium.

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

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

We need time to lose interest in things.

There's something nearly mystical about certain words and phrases that float through our lives. It's computer mysticism. Words that are computer generated to be used on products that might be sold anywhere from Japan to Denmark - words devised to be pronounceable in a hundred languages. And when you detach one of these words from the product it was designed to serve, the words acquires a chantlike quality.

The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. (Point Omega)

Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong. (Point Omega)

She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn't working.

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.

It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?

...Because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond necessity.

Technology and violence are interdependent.

For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.

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.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.

Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.

Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.

Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.

It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture.

I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.

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

The excitement of theatre is palpable but the frustrations, and the complete absence of a definitive evening - the play as text means practically nothing in a way - , there's no particular performance that is definitive in the way a novel is a solid object you hold in your hands and here it is. You can't say that about a play. If the novel gives us a sense of throbbing consciousness, theater is pure soul, beautiful and elusive.

Some people fake their death, I'm faking my life.

The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.

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.