Don DeLillo Quotes
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In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.
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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.
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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.
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Evil is movement towards void.
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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.
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The future belongs to crowds.
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I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.
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American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.
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I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing.
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For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
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Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.
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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.
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'There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.'
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May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.
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I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.
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I had centered myself, learning of the existence of an interior motion, a shift in the levels from isolation to solitude to wordlessness to immobility. When Opel occupied that center I became the thing that swirled.
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I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.
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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.
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I think fiction rescues history from its confusions.
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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.
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America was and is the immigrant's dream.
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I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread.
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I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.
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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.