Delillo Quotes

#1. A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.

Dylan Moran

#2. I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.

Mary Karr

#3. I guess of all those novels, Don DeLillo's Falling Man is the one I like the best. I thought there were some beautiful things in that, particularly the relationship between the man who finds the briefcase and the woman whose husband owned the briefcase. It's quite a beautiful passage.

Paul Auster

#4. DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.

Leslie Fiedler

#5. There's always a host of voices you're inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He's one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens.

Dylan Moran

#6. DeLillo presents art as the soundest magic against dread, the truest source of radiance and community. Albeit tentatively and ambiguously, Underworld suggests that artists may achieve an accommodation with culture that is also act of resistance. (7)

Mark Osteen

#7. I won't read a book that starts with a description of the weather. I don't read books over 300 pages, though I'll make an exception for Don Delillo.

Elmore Leonard

#8. Most American writers don't get asked their opinion on current affairs, whereas in Europe and England, we still do. There are writers here who are the most sophisticated commentators, but they're not asked. Like Don DeLillo, who sort of forecast most of the modern world before it happened.

Salman Rushdie

#9. My books - I kid you not - are very often shelved between DeLillo and de Sade. Which not only completely cracks me up, but it seems like an encouraging message from the universe: between those two, there's a lot of wiggle room. I feel just fine there.

Stacey D'Erasmo

#10. I love those adult writers with the pranking ethos, [Don] DeLillo and [Donald] Barthelme and David Foster Wallace. I don't see any reason not to bring those kinds of influences to bear on books for children.

Mac Barnett

#11. My favorite sports novel is End Zone by Delillo. It's such a great looking book too, the black cover with the football player on it. It's just a fantastic little book.

Chad Harbach

#12. Don DeLillo's 'White Noise,' which I read when I was 19. It showed me that a book can be funny as hell and deadly serious.

Kevin Barry

#13. I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists.

Kathy Acker

#14. He was waiting for a man with a knife to come out of a doorway at him. All this time, he told me, he had been trying to steal death from her body. By confronting it himself, he would keep it away from her.

Don DeLillo

#15. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it's not that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing.

Don DeLillo

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

Don DeLillo

#17. I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.

Don DeLillo

#18. She was shining a light on us, she was coming into being, endlessly being formed and reformed as the muscles in her face worked at smiling and speaking, as the electronic dots swarmed.

Don DeLillo

#19. Through history it's the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist?

Don DeLillo

#20. Cities 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.

Don DeLillo

#21. I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.

Don DeLillo

#22. 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

#23. Tourism is the march of stupidity.

Don DeLillo

#24. 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.

Don DeLillo

#25. We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identical
structures.

Don DeLillo

#26. I do not want to talk about it.

Don DeLillo

#27. 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.

Don DeLillo

#28. Some people fake their death, I'm faking my life.

Don DeLillo

#29. I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

Don DeLillo

#30. Isolation is not a drawback to those who understand that isolation is the point. I

Don DeLillo

#31. We need time to lose interest in things.

Don DeLillo

#32. Facts are lonely things

Don DeLillo

#33. If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

Don DeLillo

#34. Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another's care and protection.

Don DeLillo

#35. One must become a book before one can know what is inside it.

Don DeLillo

#36. The pattern match begins with a search for a substring of a given string that has a specified structure in the string manipulation language

Don DeLillo

#37. Is his manhood a sham? Does he love himself or hate himself? I don't think he knows. Or it changes minute to minute. Or the question is so implicit in everything he does that he can't get outside it to answer

Don DeLillo

#38. We can't do justice to our dreams, reworking them in memory. They seem borrowed, part of another life, ours only maybe and only in the farthest margins.

Don DeLillo

#39. Brita said, 'I read at home, I read in hotels, I take a book with me on a twenty-minute trip to the dentist. Then I read in the waiting room.

Don DeLillo

#40. The shallower our arguments, the more intense we became.

Don DeLillo

#41. 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

#42. The ceiling angled down right over me and I raised my arm and touched it with my fingertips. All children, I thought, should be permitted to sleep in such a room; the child loves nooks and odd angles and is frightened into nightmare by equidistance, by parallel planes which conceal nothing.

Don DeLillo

#43. Find someone to push him ever sunward.
There's always something you're not supposed to see but it is a condition of growing up that you will see it.

Don DeLillo

#44. Let's enjoy these aimless days while we can, I told myself, fearing some kind of deft acceleration.

Don DeLillo

#45. 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

#46. Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?

Don DeLillo

#47. Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.

Don DeLillo

#48. That which we fear to touch is often the very fabric of our salvation.

Don DeLillo

#49. True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

Don DeLillo

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

Don DeLillo

#51. Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.

Don DeLillo

#52. I know it's thankless to be sensible in the face of someone's primitive distrust.

Don DeLillo

#53. Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination.

Don DeLillo

#54. The world is shrinking into a kind of technological funnel. I think people are drawn into their technological devices, and this becomes a kind of subjective universe, into which much of the rest of the world simply does not enter.

Don DeLillo

#55. 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

#56. A Greek will never say anything he hasn't already said a thousand times. Her husband Charles reprimanded me for not knowing the word. To Charles it was a mark of one's respect for other cultures to know the local terms of abuse and the words for sex acts and natural wastes.

Don DeLillo

#57. When someone asks whether they have bourbon, the bartender says smugly, 'Yes, of course, James Beam, very good.' " "James Beam. That is

Don DeLillo

#58. When it rains out, it also rains in.

Don DeLillo

#59. I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

Don DeLillo

#60. 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

#61. The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.

Don DeLillo

#62. 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

Don DeLillo

#63. 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.

Don DeLillo

#64. 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.

Don DeLillo

#65. The love of minds should last beyond lives.

Don DeLillo

#66. Isn't it possible that this midcentury moment enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping strategies of eminent leaders, generals steely in their sunglasses -- the mapped visions that pierce our dreams?

Don DeLillo

#67. I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.

Don DeLillo

#68. There are people with their hands in their hair, holding in their brains.

Dom DeLillo

#69. You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal existence on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.

Don DeLillo

#70. If you let me teach you not to end a sentence with a preposition, Edgar thought, I will save your life.

Don DeLillo

#71. He liked to talk about the anatomy of racecars, motorcycles, hunting rifles, how things work, and she liked to listen. It was a mark of the distance between them that she listened so eagerly, the perennial miles, the weeks and months

Don DeLillo

#72. The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there,' she said. 'This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.

Don DeLillo

#73. Why something and not nothing? why music and not noise?

Don DeLillo

#74. You are sure that you are right but you don't want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools.

Don DeLillo

#75. Self-pity oozed through my soul. I tried to relax and enjoy it.

Don DeLillo

#76. She was plain except when she laughed. She was someone on the subway. She wore loose skirts and plain shoes and was full-figured and maybe a little clumsy but when she laughed there was a flare in nature, an unfolding of something half hidden and dazzling.

Don DeLillo

#77. 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.

Don DeLillo

#78. A surface separates inside form out and belongs no less to one than the other.

Don DeLillo

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

Don DeLillo

#80. Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.

Don DeLillo

#81. That's what in theory differentiates a writer from everyone else. You see and hear more clearly.

Don DeLillo

#82. Like I'm a person and you're a person, which gives you the right to kill me.

Don DeLillo

#83. But there are different kinds of death, David. And I prefer that kind, his kind, to the death I've been fighting all my life.

Don DeLillo

#84. The TV was a rage-making machine, working at him all the time, giving him direction and scope, enlarging him in a sense, filling him with a world rage, a great stalking soreness and rancour.

Don DeLillo

#85. How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature.

Don DeLillo

#86. I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.

Don DeLillo

#87. It is the neon epic of Saturday night.

Don DeLillo

#88. People eat and sleep in the shadow of what we do

Don DeLillo

#89. It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself. A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying.

Don DeLillo

#90. Ample women do not plan such things. They lack the guile for conspiracies of the body.

Don DeLillo

#91. Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We don't need God or miracles or the flight of the bumble bee. But it is also crouched and undecidable. It can go either way.

Don DeLillo

#92. We're the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter.

Don DeLillo

#93. Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war

Don DeLillo

#94. Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.

Don DeLillo

#95. You don't believe in heaven? A nun?'
'If you don't, why should I?'
'If you did, maybe I would.'
'If I did, you would not have to.

Don DeLillo

#96. Her sweat is a rank reminder, the only one, that she exists, that she is separate from the things that surround her.

Don DeLillo

#97. 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.

Don DeLillo

#98. It's like World War III. Everything is white. They'll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort.

Don DeLillo

#99. There is a seaward bulge of stratocumulus. Sun glint and littoral drift. I see blooms of plankton in a blue of such Persian richness it seems an animal rapture, a colour change to express some form of intuitive delight.

Don DeLillo

#100. It's impossible to write about the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath without taking note of twenty-five years of paranoia which has collected around that event.

Don DeLillo