Top 350 Quotes & Sayings by Don DeLillo - Page 2

Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

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

I'd like to lose interest in myself.

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

Being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do.

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.

You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.

Facts are lonely things.

When he died he would not end. The world would end.

People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It's simply how we live.

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.

Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.

I felt myself getting whiter... What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in?

Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first.

I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.

It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.

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.

Longing on a large scale makes history.

Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

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

And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

Was she naked?" Lasher said. "To the waist," Cotsakis said. "From which direction?" Lasher said.

Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.

Tourism is the march of stupidity.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.

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

Something lurked inside the truth.

Murray said, ´I don´t trust anybody´s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.´

The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.

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.

Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.

Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals.

My attitudes aren't directed toward characters at all. I don't feel sympathetic toward some characters, unsympathetic toward others. I don't love some characters, feel contempt for others. They have attitudes; I don't.

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

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.

If an idea seems to find its way towards a stage setting, that's the direction I take. I don't know if I'm trying to achieve anything other than to follow an idea on to the page.

Clouds are no deterrent. Clouds intensify the drama, trap and shape the light.

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.

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.

The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.

When I work I have a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words I'm making. I use a machine with larger than average letters: the bigger the better.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire.

Technology is lust removed from nature.

Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.

Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.

Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.

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

The world isn't going to be destroyed, but you don't feel safe anymore in your plane or train or office or auditorium.

It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.

We need time to lose interest in things.

Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of inter-communication is awe-inspiring.

Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.

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.

Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

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