Don DeLillo Quotes

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.

The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings.

I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.

I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.

A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.

She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear.

Eric Packer about Vija Kinski

Why are free spirits always so fucking dumb?

Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I wouldn't say that to a dying man.

Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your causal gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves of identity and being. There are no amateurs in the world of children

Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure.

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

Then they’re always trying to sell you something. Everything is based on forcing people to buy. If you can’t buy what they’re selling, you’re a zero in the system.

I like simple men and complicated women.

Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.

Share Page

Don DeLillo Wiki

Don DeLillo At Amazon

Best Quotes Ever Topics

Best Quotes Ever Authors