Quotes By Don DeLillo

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

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

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

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.

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

There's never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President.

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.

Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.

America was and is the immigrant's dream.

People will always make comparisons.

I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.

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

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

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

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.

I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.

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

I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.

Hardship makes the world obscure.

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

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

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.

Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.

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

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

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.