Don DeLillo famous quotes

As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.
-- Don DeLillo

#Technology #Scope #Primitive

I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.
-- Don DeLillo

#Soul #Want #Silver

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.
-- Don DeLillo

#Book #Thinking #Europe

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.
-- Don DeLillo

#Animal #Earth #Irony

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.
-- Don DeLillo

#Solitude #Way #Endless

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

#Fabric #Salvation

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.
-- Don DeLillo

#Life #Memories #Thinking

These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.
-- Don DeLillo

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.
-- Don DeLillo

#Memories #Names #Too Much

I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.
-- Don DeLillo

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.
-- Don DeLillo

#Sweet #Rain #Firsts

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

#True Life #Life Is

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.
-- Don DeLillo

#Hero #Writing #Identity

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
-- Don DeLillo

#Writing #Thinking #Form

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.
-- Don DeLillo

#Writing #Identity #Form

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.
-- Don DeLillo

#Writing #Thinking #People

In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled.
-- Don DeLillo

#Country #Dream #Men

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.
-- Don DeLillo

#Waiting #Ends #Sentences

Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.
-- Don DeLillo

#Pain #Reality #Lightning

Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.
-- Don DeLillo

#Rushing #Brain #Molecules

Longing on a large scale makes history.
-- Don DeLillo

#Longing #Scales

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.
-- Don DeLillo

#Book #Three #Four

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.
-- Don DeLillo

#Photography #Past #Technology

There is no lie in war or preparation of war that can't be defended.
-- Don DeLillo

#War #Lying #Preparation

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.
-- Don DeLillo

#Believe #Following Rules #Grooming

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.
-- Don DeLillo

#Art #Mind #Important

Pain is just another form of information.
-- Don DeLillo

#Pain #Information #Form

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.
-- Don DeLillo

#Taken #Artist #Thinking

I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.
-- Don DeLillo

#Writing #Thinking #Trying

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

#Technology #Littles #Faces

People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units.
-- Don DeLillo

#People #Dying #Culture

If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.
-- Don DeLillo

#Understanding #Feelings #Needs

I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.
-- Don DeLillo

When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.
-- Don DeLillo

#House #Bird #Looks

That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.
-- Don DeLillo

#Vacation #People #Relax

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

#California #Style #Doom

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.
-- Don DeLillo

#Writing #Thinking #Years

One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness.
-- Don DeLillo

#Consciousness #Terrorist

America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.
-- Don DeLillo

#America #Trying

Something lurked inside the truth.
-- Don DeLillo

All human existence is a trick of light.
-- Don DeLillo

#Light #Tricks #Existence

Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.
-- Don DeLillo

#Humanity #Historical #Lovely