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Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.
Don DeLillo
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Terror makes the new future possible. All men one man, Men live in history as never before. He is saying we make an change history minute by minute. History is not the book or the human memory. We do history in the morning and change it after lunch.
Don DeLillo
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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.
Don DeLillo
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Of course the humanistic mind crumbles at the whole idea. It's the most hideous thing in the world to these people that such ideas even have to be mentioned. But the thing won't go away. The thing is here and you have to face it. The prospect of a humane war may be hideous and all the other names you can think of, but it's still a prospect. And as an alternative to all the other things that could happen in the event of war, it's relatively acceptable.
Don DeLillo
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True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.
Don DeLillo
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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.
Don DeLillo
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Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.
Don DeLillo
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I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.
Don DeLillo
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I had centered myself, learning of the existence of an interior motion, a shift in the levels from isolation to solitude to wordlessness to immobility. When Opel occupied that center I became the thing that swirled.
Don DeLillo
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Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.
Don DeLillo
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The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.
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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?
Don DeLillo
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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.
Don DeLillo
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It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.
Don DeLillo
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The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire.
Don DeLillo
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People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.
Don DeLillo
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We surrounded ourselves with smoke and loud noise. That's the way we chose to live. I'm prepared to defend it.
Don DeLillo
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I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.
Don DeLillo
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I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.
Don DeLillo
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I think fiction recues history from its confusions.
Don DeLillo
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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.
Don DeLillo
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The instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms
Don DeLillo
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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.
Don DeLillo
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A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.
Don DeLillo
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Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.
Don DeLillo
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
Don DeLillo
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Born:
November 20, 1936
(age 87)
Bio:
Donald Richard "Don" DeLillo is an American novelist, playwright and essayist.
Known for:
White Noise (1985)
Underworld (1997)
Zero K (2016)
Mao II (1991)
Falling Man (2007)
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