Quotes By Don DeLillo

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

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

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

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.

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

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.

I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.

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.

Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.

May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.

The future belongs to crowds.

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.

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.

The language of my books has shaped me as a man.

Rushdie is a hostage.

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

A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn't live his life in a certain way, this death is an introduction to an eternity of pain.

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.

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

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?

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

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

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.

When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.

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.

America was and is the immigrant's dream.