Quotes By Don DeLillo

Hardship makes the world obscure.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The future belongs to crowds.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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