Don DeLillo
We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.Collection: Book
A writer decides to follow some ideas and not others for reasons that aren't always clear to him. It's often a matter of intuition.Collection: Ideas
That's how you write novels actually. You suddenly hit upon something and you realize this is the path you were meant to take. You'd be a fool if you didn't follow it. Perhaps it's like solving a difficult question in pure mathematics. There must be a moment when the solution is so simple and evident that you wonder why you hadn't come upon it before. When you do come upon it, you know it in the deepest part of your being. It carries its own logic.Collection: Writing
Terror is now the world narrative, unquestionably. When those two buildings were struck, and when they collapsed, it was, in effect, an extraordinary blow to consciousness, and it changed everything.Collection: Blow
That's what in theory differentiates a writer from everyone else. You see and hear more clearly.Collection: Theory
I would never write in response to what I believe the public wanted or needed.Collection: Believe
We don't really know how technology will affect narrative. That's the question. See, people used to say that the novel is going to die, but they would never say that movies will die with it, when in fact all forms depend on the narrative. I think if one of them fails, the others are going to fail as well. Maybe this will happen to both forms, and maybe movies will take a totally different direction with fiction.Collection: Technology
The music I like best is kind of frozen in my mind from the Sixties and Seventies. I still listen to the same jazz music I listened to when I was eighteen years old, and like and admire it just as much.Collection: Years
It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.Collection: Long
I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.Collection: Writing
It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.'Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Effort
World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.Collection: Mean
Famous people don't want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there's something crawling in their clothes.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Letting Go
You become a serious novelist by living long enough.Collection: Writing
I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.Collection: Meaningful
We commit our crimes at night and reveal ourselves in the high noon of studio lights.Collection: Night
Evil is movement towards void.Collection: Evil
You gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.Collection: Speak
He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.Collection: Eye
Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.Collection: Running
There are no amateurs in the world of children.Collection: Children
For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.Collection: Religious
days like this. i look at you and feel electric. tell me you don't feel it too."_Eric PackerCollection: Days Like This
He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.Collection: Writing
The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.Collection: Uncles
To plot is to live. […] We start out lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state funeral, Jack. It is all precision, detail, order, design. The nation holds its breath. - (WN 292)Collection: Order
A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.Collection: One Day
History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood -- read the speeches of Mussolini -- at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation. (82)Collection: Believe
Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets.' (20)Collection: People
A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.Collection: Real
We're the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter.Collection: Matter
I think silence is the condition you accept as the judgment on your crimes.Collection: Thinking
To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.Collection: Editing
I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.Collection: Novelists
Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S. Why not use it?Collection: Culture
A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.Collection: Photography
There is no lie in war or preparation of war that can't be defended.Collection: War
I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become.Collection: Roles
All who have their reward on Earth, the fruits Of painful superstition and blind zeal, Naught seeking but the praise of men, here find Fit retribution, empty as their deeds.Collection: Men
It's not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.Collection: Hate
We feel certain that the extraterrestrial message is a mathematical code of some kind. Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality.Collection: Independent
I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.Collection: Made
There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.Collection: Taken
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.Collection: Want
Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.Collection: Barns
America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.Collection: America
I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.Collection: Writing