Don DeLillo
Pain is just another form of information.Collection: Pain
I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.Collection: Soul
It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreamsCollection: Dream
A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.Collection: Solitude
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.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Taken
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.Collection: Vacation
The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.Collection: True Life
I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.Collection: I Can
You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.Collection: Break Through
Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.Collection: Moving
Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.Collection: Somewhere Else
Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.Collection: Memories
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?Collection: Morning
We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.Collection: Believe
You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.Collection: Needs
It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.Collection: Homesick
Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets.Collection: Insanity
People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night.Collection: Night
I do think that in the near future, if it hasn't happened already, people will be able to use technology to design their own novels, perhaps with individuals themselves as the main character. In other words, everything is being individualized and narrowed.Collection: Character
Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.Collection: Stories
To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.Collection: Football
In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.Collection: Writing
Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong. (Point Omega)Collection: Sometimes
It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line.Collection: Fall
I am very unmusical. I can't carry a tune. I would never be able to play an instrument.Collection: Play
The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it.Collection: Rocks
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".Collection: Memories
If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.Collection: Vanity
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.Collection: Writing
Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.Collection: Talking
Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.Collection: Eye
Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now.Collection: Doe
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.Collection: Loss
Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.Collection: Self
Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into the night, if you stand a while and look.Collection: Night
We surrounded ourselves with smoke and loud noise. That's the way we chose to live. I'm prepared to defend it.Collection: Noise
If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.Collection: Art
Technology and violence are interdependent.Collection: Technology
Certainly I've never tried to imagine what the future will hold. It's a hopeless endeavor to try to do such a thing.Collection: Trying
There's something nearly mystical about certain words and phrases that float through our lives. It's computer mysticism. Words that are computer generated to be used on products that might be sold anywhere from Japan to Denmark - words devised to be pronounceable in a hundred languages. And when you detach one of these words from the product it was designed to serve, the words acquires a chantlike quality.Collection: Japan
Naturally a direct comparison of terrorist and novelist is complete nonsense. But there was once a time when the novelist also had some influence on how his contemporaries thought, the way they saw the world, the way they lived.Collection: Novelists
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.Collection: Thinking
A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require.Collection: Ideas
Writers, some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren't noticed in the way that a writer might notice.Collection: People
Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror. Today, the men who shape and inflence human consciousness are the terrorists.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Beautiful
I marched and I protested against the war in Vietnam, along with many, many thousands of others. But I never quite understood the bombs that were placed in science labs or office buildings.Collection: War