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.Collection: Wedding
People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.Collection: Power
People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.Collection: Power
There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.Collection: Nature
I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.Collection: Communication
In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.Collection: Technology
In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.Collection: Society
It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture.Collection: Independence
Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.Collection: Nature
The future belongs to crowds.
Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.
The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?
I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.
I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.
There's never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President.
May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.
I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.
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.
America was and is the immigrant's dream.
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.
A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn't live his life in a certain way, this death is an introduction to an eternity of pain.
For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
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.
When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.
Hardship makes the world obscure.
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.
American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.
I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.
I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.
I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?
I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.
I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.
I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.
I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.
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.
People will always make comparisons.
Rushdie is a hostage.
The language of my books has shaped me as a man.
The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.
There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.
Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.
Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.
Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
It occured to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.
As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.Collection: Technology
How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Life
What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.Collection: Fabric
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.Collection: Animal