Don DeLillo Quotes

May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.

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

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night.

why something and not nothing? why music and not noise?

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

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

In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.

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

It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line.

If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.

Isn't death the boundary we need?

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.

You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.

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

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

Facts are lonely things.

Clouds are no deterrent. Clouds intensify the drama, trap and shape the light.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

If an idea seems to find its way towards a stage setting, that's the direction I take. I don't know if I'm trying to achieve anything other than to follow an idea on to the page.

Something lurked inside the truth.

Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

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

Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.

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

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? (155)

To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.

A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.

It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.'

A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

I've always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.

I am very unmusical. I can't carry a tune. I would never be able to play an instrument.

The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it.

What terrorists gain, novelists lose.

The language of my books has shaped me as a man.

holes are interesting. there are books about holes.

Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera? Because our lives are a vivid situation.

In the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape.

We're the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter.

... there was an honesty inherent in bulkiness if it is just the right amount.

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.

Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.

Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.

That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.

In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too.

I'd like to lose interest in myself.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

I felt myself getting whiter... What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in?