Top 350 Quotes & Sayings by Don DeLillo - Page 4

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

The best moments involve a loss of control. It's a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often - completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages - I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.

A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.

Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.

We commit our crimes at night and reveal ourselves in the high noon of studio lights.

You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.

What terrorists gain, novelists lose.

I've always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.

The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it.

Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.

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.

Evil is movement towards void.

One of my earliest memories as a reader - I don't know how old I was, quite young - was a poem of his, called "Fog," and I remember the first verse, "The fog comes / on little cat feet".

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

I was never either pro-culture or counter-culture. I was in a kind of middle state.

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.

You live in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.'

History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood -- read the speeches of Mussolini -- at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation. (82)

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending. So for much of the period in which I'm writing, I'm waiting to understand what's going to happen next, and how and where it's going to happen. In some cases, fairly early in the process, I do know how a book will end. But most of the time, not at all, and in this particular case, many questions are still unanswered, even though I've been working for months.

You feel sorry for yourself. You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is. You're lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash.

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.

If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at.

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.

I don't consider myself paranoid at all. I think I see things exactly as they are.

Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong. (Point Omega)

It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next.

I am very unmusical. I can't carry a tune. I would never be able to play an instrument.

It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.

In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary from book to book. But in many books, there is a colloquialism of address. The characters will speak in a quite idiosyncratic way sometimes.

Famous people don't want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there's something crawling in their clothes.

To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity.

holes are interesting. there are books about holes.

Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake. And I'm the actor made up for the laying-out.

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.

You become a serious novelist by living long enough.

You gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.

Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera? Because our lives are a vivid situation.

In the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape.

Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now.

There are two categories of writers, it could be said: The author who is just a voice, and the one who is also creating a picture. I belong to the latter, because I have an acute visual sense.

The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.

The family was an art ... and the dinner table was the place it found expression.

The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.

I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let's not say men. Let's say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.

I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography.

Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.

Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.

He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.

...Because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond necessity.

As belief shrinks from the world, it is more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.

They passed out of the shade beneath the eaves and flew into sunglare and silence and it was an action she only partly saw, elusive and mutely beautiful, the birds so sunstruck they were consumed by light, disembodied, turned into something sheer and fleet and scatter-bright.

A dead afternoon in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.

At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her.

When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don't have an audience; I have a set of standards.