Don DeLillo - Writer Quotes

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American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.

Don DeLillo
There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

Don DeLillo
If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

Don DeLillo
When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear.

Don DeLillo
Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

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

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

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

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

Don DeLillo
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.

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