Don Delillo Quotes

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. ~ Don DeLillo

This was worse than a retched nightmare. It was the nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder of the world ~ Don DeLillo

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

I realized the place was awash in noise. The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension. ~ Don DeLillo

It was the best kind of class to have in the afternoon, an exercise in almost pure language, demanding nothing more than fractional consciousness since there wasn't the slightest hope of understanding what those poems were all about, and we drowsed and smiled, happy in our own little angel-infancy, snug in our Thamesian punt, and when the sonic belch of experimental jets went ripping across the desert we came close to applauding the symbolism; but a trembling applause it would have been, for we knew that it signaled the death of our drowsy England and the beginning of a new mortality, just months away now, the start of job, mate, child, desk, drink, sit, squat, quiver, die. ~ Don DeLillo

People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being. ~ Don DeLillo

I am a twentiethcentury individual. I am working myself up to a point where I can exist beyond guilt, beyond blood, beyond the ridiculous past. Thank goodness for America. In this country there's a chance to accomplish such a thing. I want to look straight ahead. I want to see things clearly. I'd like to become singleminded and straightforward in the most literal sense of those words. History is no more accurate than prophecy. I reject the wrathful God of the Hebrews. I reject the Christian God of love and money, although I don't reject love itself or money itself. I reject heritage, background, tradition and birthright. These things merely slow the progress of the human race. They result in war and insanity, war and insanity, war and insanity. ~ Don DeLillo

Steffie took my hand and we walked past the fruit bins, an area that extended about forty-five yards along one wall. The bins were arranged diagonally and backed my mirrors that people accidentally punched when reaching for fruit in upper rows. ~ Don DeLillo

Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools, idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don't want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. We are your fools, your madwomen, rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for good health, long life. ~ Don DeLillo

Exile in a real place, a place of few bodies and many stones, is just an extension (a packaging) of the other exile, the state of being separated from whatever is left of the center of one's own history ~ Don DeLillo

Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death. ~ Don DeLillo

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. ~ Don DeLillo

How could there be a north below a south? Is this what I found confusing? ~ Don DeLillo

Mouth cat's-cradled with filaments of gleaming cheese. ~ Don DeLillo

Days like this. i look at you and feel electric. tell me you don't feel it too._Eric Packer ~ Don DeLillo

I never wanted to change the world. ~ Don DeLillo

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

I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it. ~ Don DeLillo

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

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

That's what in theory differentiates a writer from everyone else. You see and hear more clearly. ~ Don DeLillo

The ruins stood above the hissing traffic like some monument to doomed expectations. ~ Don DeLillo

Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a
local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous
thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over
the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a
revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body
heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the
unseen something that haunts the day - men in fedoras and sailors on
shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game. ~ Don DeLillo

That night, after the movie, driving my father's car along the country roads, I began to wonder how real the landscape truly was, and how much of a dream is a dream. ~ Don DeLillo

I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else. ~ Don DeLillo

She was transcribing names and phone numbers from an old book to a new one. There were no addresses. Her friends had phone numbers only, a race of people with a seven-bit analog consciousness. ~ Don DeLillo

We travel into or away from our photographs. ~ Don DeLillo

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

Marian and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn't say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make? ~ Don DeLillo

We must be equal to the largeness of things. ~ Don DeLillo

She liked to think. What did she like to think? She was having a dumb day and wanted to blame the fog.
Maybe he falls, he slides, if that is a useful word, from his experience of an objective world, the deepest description of space-time, where he does not feel a sense of future direction - he slides into her experience, everyone's, the standard sun-kissed chronology of events.
Am I the first human to abduct an alien? ~ Don DeLillo

Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war ~ Don DeLillo

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. ~ Don DeLillo

What you see is not what wee se. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years. ~ Don DeLillo

That's why he was here, to surrender himself to longing, to listen to his host recite the anecdotal texts, all the passed-down stories of bonehead plays and swirling brawls, the pitching duels that carried into twilight, stories that Marvin had been collecting for half a century
the deep eros of memory that separates baseball from other sports. ~ Don DeLillo

Writing is freedom. ~ Don DeLillo

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. ~ Don DeLillo

Everyone wants to own the end of the world. ~ Don DeLillo

I think my work is influenced by the fact that we're living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times. ~ Don DeLillo

Jessie was trying to read science fiction but nothing she read so far could begin to match ordinary life on this planet, she said, for sheer unimaginableness. ~ Don DeLillo

The novel used to feed our search for meaning. Quoting Bill. It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don't need the novel. Quoting Bill. We don't even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings. ~ Don DeLillo

The instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms. ~ Don DeLillo

These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of species. What could be more useless than a man who couldn't fix a dripping faucet - fundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes? I wasn't sure I disagreed. ~ Don DeLillo

The camera implies meaning where no meaning exists. I had not celebrated that brother and sister. I had mocked them. I had exploited their sorrow. I had tried to make them part of a hopeful message on the state of the Union. To be black is to be the actor. To be white is to be the critic. ~ Don DeLillo

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

When it rains out, it also rains in. ~ Don DeLillo

She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn't working. ~ Don DeLillo

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. ~ Don DeLillo

To have true socialism, he said, we first establish capitalism, totally and heartlessly, and then destroy it by degrees, bury it in the sea. ~ Don DeLillo

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? ~ Don DeLillo

The excitement of theatre is palpable but the frustrations, and the complete absence of a definitive evening - the play as text means practically nothing in a way - , there's no particular performance that is definitive in the way a novel is a solid object you hold in your hands and here it is. You can't say that about a play. If the novel gives us a sense of throbbing consciousness, theater is pure soul, beautiful and elusive. ~ Don DeLillo

It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line. I assume you know that, he said. ~ Don DeLillo

Tourism is the march of stupidity. ~ Don DeLillo

Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets.' (20) ~ Don DeLillo

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

The time of dangling insects arrived. White houses with caterpillars dangling from the eaves. White stones in driveways. You can walk at night down the middle of the street and hear women talking on the telephone. Warmer weather produces voices in the dark. They are talking about their adolescent sons. How big, how fast. The sons are almost frightening. The quantities they eat. The way they loom in doorways. These are the days that are full of wormy bugs. They are in the grass, stuck to the siding, hanging in the hair, hanging from the trees and eaves, stuck to the window screens. The women talk long-distance to grandparents of growing boys. They share the Trimline phone, beamish old folks in hand-knit sweaters on fixed incomes.
What happens to them when the commercial ends? ~ 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

But then it came time for me to make my journey - into America. [ ... N]o coincidence that my first novel is called Americana. That became my subject, the subject that shaped my work. When I get a French translation of one of my books that says 'translated from the American', I think, 'Yes, that's exactly right. ~ Don DeLillo

I felt the distance and stillness of that sprawled dawn like some endless sky waking inside me, flared against the laughter. ~ Don DeLillo

You are the happy one. I am the doomed fool. ~ Don DeLillo

The women kept washing floors. It seemed to be what they did in difficult times. Unvarying things, she saw, must have a deeper value than we know. ~ Don DeLillo

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

You knew her for years and I knew her for minutes. It comes to the same thing. These matters have to be assessed in the light of eternity. ~ Don DeLillo

I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never. ~ Don DeLillo

Think of two parallel lines. [ ... ] One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny. - David Ferrie (339) ~ Don DeLillo

The language of my books has shaped me as a man. ~ Don DeLillo

If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought," he said, "the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy. ~ Don DeLillo

Her umbrella was useless in the wind. It was the kind of wind-whipped rain that empties the streets of people and makes day and place feel anonymous. ~ Don DeLillo

Evil is movement towards void. ~ Don DeLillo

Don't you sometimes feel a power in you? An extreme state of good health. An arrogant healthiness. That's it. You are feeling so good you begin thinking you're a little superior to most people. An optimism about yourself that you generate at the expense of others. Don't you sometimes feel this? ~ Don DeLillo

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. ~ Don DeLillo

This is what comes from the wrong kind of attentiveness. People get brain fade. This is because they've forgotten how to listen and look as children. They've forgotten how to collect data. In the psychic sense a forest fire on TV is on a lower plane than a ten-second spot for Automatic Dishwasher All. The commercial has deeper waves, deeper emanations. But we have reversed the relative significance of these things. This is why people's eyes, ears, brains and nervous systems have grown weary. It's a simple case of misuse. ~ Don DeLillo

He told me that I hadn't done anything yet. Hadn't lived yet. All you do is pass the time, he said. ~ Don DeLillo

Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts. ~ Don DeLillo

Marriage is something we make from available materials. In this sense, it's improvised, it's almost offhand. Maybe this is why we know so little about it. It's too inspired and quicksilver a thing to be clearly understood. Two people make a blur. ~ Don DeLillo

I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself. ~ Don DeLillo

It was May of my senior year at Leighton Gage and on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons we sat in an air-conditioned hourglass and savored our own total incomprehension as an assistant professor charted the poems of Dryden, Lovelace, Fanshawe and Suckling. They were all so incomparably dead, the Penguin poets, and we loved them because their lines meant less to us than the dark side of the moon. ~ Don DeLillo

Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S. Why not use it? ~ Don DeLillo

Let's examine the nature of the beast, so to speak. The male animal. Isn't there a fund, a pool, a reservoir of potential violence in the male psyche? ... Isn't there a deep field, a sort of crude oil deposit that one might tap if and when the occasion warrants? A great dark lake of male rage ... Isn't there a sludgy region you'd rather not know about? A remnant of some prehistoric period when dinosaurs roamed the earth and men fought with flint tools? When to kill was to live? ... Only your code allows you to enter the system. ~ Don DeLillo

Look past the violence. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun. ~ Don DeLillo

That's great. Tell me about it. 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. The beginning of the end. ~ Don DeLillo

First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there's a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger. ~ Don DeLillo

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. ~ Don DeLillo

Everything was on television last night ~ Don DeLillo

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. ~ Don DeLillo

News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before - what? I don't know. But you're smart to trap us in your camera before we disappear. ~ Don DeLillo

There's just so much time set aside for baffled reaction. I believe we've reached the limit. ~ Don DeLillo

Nothingness is staring you in the face. Utter and permanent oblivion. You will cease to be. To be, Jack. The dier accepts this and dies. The killer, in theory, attempts to defeat his own death by killing others. He buys time, he buys life. - Murray (WN 291) ~ Don DeLillo

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

This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track. ~ Don DeLillo

Silence, exile, cunning and so on ... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work. ~ Don DeLillo

They had to evacuate the grade school on Tuesday. Kids were getting headaches and eye irritations, tasting metal in their mouths. A teacher rolled on the floor and spoke foreign languages. No one knew what was wrong. Investigators said it could be the ventilating system, the paint or varnish, the foam insulation, the electrical insulation, the cafeteria food, the rays emitted by microcomputers, the asbestos fireproofing, the adhesive on shipping containers, the fumes from the chlorinated pool, or perhaps something deeper, finer-grained, more closely woven into the basic state of things. ~ Don DeLillo

What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything. ~ Don DeLillo

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

In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past. ~ Don DeLillo

Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not. [ ... ] To plot, to take aim at something, to shape time and space. This is how we advance the art of human consciousness. (WN 291-2) ~ Don DeLillo

People stress the violence. That's the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there's a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There's a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there's a satisfaction to the game that can't be duplicated. There's a harmony. ~ Don DeLillo

If your child thinks you're guilty of something, right or wrong, then you're guilty. ~ Don DeLillo

He picks up speed and seems to lose his gangliness, the slouchy funk of hormones and unbelonging and all the stammering things that seal his adolescence. He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides bring him into eloquence. ~ Don DeLillo

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? ~ Don DeLillo