Don DeLillo - People Quotes

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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
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
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
People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.

Don DeLillo
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.

Don DeLillo
I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let's not say men. Let's say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.

Don DeLillo
Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire--not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.

Don DeLillo
In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are.

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

Don DeLillo
Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.

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

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

Don DeLillo
He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.

Don DeLillo
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.

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
People stress the violence. That's the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there's a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There's a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there's a satisfaction to the game that can't be duplicated. There's a harmony.

Don DeLillo
I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.

Don DeLillo
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.

Don DeLillo
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.

Don DeLillo
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.

Don DeLillo
Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets.'

Don DeLillo
People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.

Don DeLillo
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.

Don DeLillo
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.

Don DeLillo
There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.

Don DeLillo