Don DeLillo Quotes

“Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets.”

“California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.”

“I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing.”

“War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.”

“The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire.”

“When he died he would not end. The world would end.”

“For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.”

“The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.”

“Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.”

“He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.”

“The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.”

“I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.”

“He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.”

“I think fiction rescues history from its confusions.”

“I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.”

“I think what'll happen in the not-too-distant future is that we'll have humane wars.”

“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.”

“No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.”

“I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.”

“Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.”

“If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”

“There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?”

“The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.”

“Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.”

“It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.”

“All plots tend to move deathwards. This is the nature of plots.”

“It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.”

“Facts are lonely things”

“Talent is more erotic when it's wasted.”

“That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.”

“What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.”

“Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.”

“It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams”

“You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”

“Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?'

What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing”

“Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.”

“Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.”

“I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.”

“I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.”

“A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.”

“These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.”

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

“Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?”

“Let's enjoy the aimless days while we still can.”

“It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.”

“The more things I threw away, the more I found.”

“Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong. (Point Omega)”

“Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.”

“Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.”

“Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.”

“Maybe when we die, the first thing we’ll say is, 'I know this feeling. I was here before.”

“Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.”

“The instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms.”

“Longing on a large scale makes history.”

“sex finds us. sex sees through us. that's why it's so shattering. it strips us of appearances."_Eric Packer”

“Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.”

“That which we fear to touch is often the very fabric of our salvation.”

“I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own distasters.”

“When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.”

“How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?”

“The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.”

“He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.”

“Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.”

“A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.”

“I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.”

“Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it.”