Don DeLillo Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

Any curly-haired boy can write windswept ballads. You have to crush people's heads. That's the only way to make those fuckers listen.

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

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.

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.

When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.

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

Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.

The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.

Of course you know. You're brilliant. Everyone says so."
"What else can they say? I do neurochemistry. No one knows what that is.

Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?

If you could stretch a given minute, what would you find between its unstuck components? Probably some kind of astral madness. A bleak comprehension of the final size of things.

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

The love of minds should last beyond lives.

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