Quotes By Don DeLillo

People will always make comparisons.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Hardship makes the world obscure.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The future belongs to crowds.

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.