Quotes By 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.

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.

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.

America was and is the immigrant's dream.

People will always make comparisons.

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

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.

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.

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

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 the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.

Hardship makes the world obscure.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.