Don DeLillo Quotes

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 think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.

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

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

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

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

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

Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be.

And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

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

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 writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.

Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously, I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered.

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

Pain is just another form of information.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.

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.

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 true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

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.

To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the sombre renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings.

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

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

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

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn't working.

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

The world isn't going to be destroyed, but you don't feel safe anymore in your plane or train or office or auditorium.

I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.

Longing on a large scale makes history.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.

It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

To be a tourist is to escape accountability.

Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

The future belongs to crowds.

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past.

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.

Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals.

Tourism is the march of stupidity.

People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.

Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination.