Don DeLillo: Trending quotes (page 4)

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.”

“Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.”

“We need time to lose interest in things.”

“It is all falling indelibly into the past.”

“Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.”

“To become a crowd is to keep out death.”

“I think fiction rescues history from its confusions.”

“In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.”

“Every disaster made us wish for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.”

“I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become.”

“Popular culture is inescapable in the U. S. Why not use it?”