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.
4917The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.
2498It'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.
2841That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.
2202Any curly-haired boy can write windswept ballads. You have to crush people's heads. That's the only way to make those fuckers listen.
1417What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.
1790No 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.
4274I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.
1735The 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.
2278When 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.
3899Doesn'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
1852Time 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.
4411The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.
1323Of course you know. You're brilliant. Everyone says so."
"What else can they say? I do neurochemistry. No one knows what that is.
4234Would 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?
2000If 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.
3797Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.
4382I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.
2711The love of minds should last beyond lives.
2279Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously, I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered.
4968The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings.
3055I 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.
2129Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.
4726I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.
3645A 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.
4651She 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
4692Why are free spirits always so fucking dumb?
1899Think 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.
2585Make 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
3842Cities 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.
3395California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
4954Then 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.
4671I like simple men and complicated women.
2757Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.
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