Don DeLillo Quotes

206 Sourced Quotes

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

Don DeLillo
Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

Don DeLillo
I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread.

Don DeLillo
I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it.

Don DeLillo
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.

Don DeLillo
I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become.

Don DeLillo
I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.

Don DeLillo
Sex finds us out. Sex sees through us. That's why it's so shattering. It strips us of appearances.

Don DeLillo
What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.

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

Don DeLillo
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.

Don DeLillo
In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

Don DeLillo
Corporations are great and appalling things. They take you and shape you in nearly nothing flat, twist and swivel you. And they do it without overt persuasion, they do it with smiles and nods, a collective inflection of the voice.

Don DeLillo
Don't you realize that as long as you have to sit down to pee, you'll never be a dominant force in the world? You'll never be a convincing technocrat or middle manager. Because people will know. She's in there sitting down.

Don DeLillo
I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.

Don DeLillo
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
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
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
Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.

Don DeLillo
I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.

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

Don DeLillo
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.

Don DeLillo
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
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
It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.

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

Don DeLillo