Quotes by Don DeLillo

• 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.
• I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.
• Hardship makes the world obscure.
• 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.
• America was and is the immigrant's dream.
• American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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?
• The language of my books has shaped me as a man.
• The future belongs to crowds.
• Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.
• Rushdie is a hostage.
• People will always make comparisons.
• People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.
• People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.
• 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.
• Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.
• May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.
• There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.
• In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.
• 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.
• I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.
• I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.
• I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.
• I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.
• I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.
• I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.
• 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 slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.
• 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 quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.
• 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.
• 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.
• It occured to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.
• There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.
• 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.
• When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.
• Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.
• The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.