Don DeLillo Quotes

206 Sourced Quotes

Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.

Don DeLillo
In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere.

Don DeLillo
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.

Don DeLillo
There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.

Don DeLillo
Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the sombre renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings.

Don DeLillo
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.

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

Don DeLillo
First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there's a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger.

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

Don DeLillo
There was an honesty inherent in bulkiness if it is just the right amount.

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

Don DeLillo
Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is 'I know this feeling. I was here before'.

Don DeLillo
You feel sorry for yourself. You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is. You're lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash.

Don DeLillo
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.

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

Don DeLillo
A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.

Don DeLillo
I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography.

Don DeLillo
Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

Don DeLillo
It's the size of things that worries people. No reason for the universe to be so large.

Don DeLillo
America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.

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

Don DeLillo
Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.

Don DeLillo
My attitudes aren't directed toward characters at all. I don't feel sympathetic toward some characters, unsympathetic toward others. I don't love some characters, feel contempt for others. They have attitudes; I don't.

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

Don DeLillo
Perhaps we've invented conspiracies for our own psychic well-being, to heal ourselves.

Don DeLillo
In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.

Don DeLillo