Don DeLillo
It is all falling indelibly into the past.Collection: Fall
When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.Collection: Reality
The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.Collection: Wise
Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.Collection: Meaningful
When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don't have an audience; I have a set of standards.Collection: Typewriters
Some people fake their death, I'm faking my life.Collection: Life
... there was an honesty inherent in bulkiness if it is just the right amount.Collection: Honesty
One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness.Collection: Novelists
Music is dangerous in so many ways. It's the most dangerous thing in the world.Collection: World
There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or 'terror in a lonely place', the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind.Collection: Lonely
As belief shrinks from the world, it is more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.Collection: Children
Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.Collection: Humanity
Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously, I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered.Collection: Legs
If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.Collection: Heart
I think it's only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place. But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes.Collection: Country
America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Thinking
A dead afternoon in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.Collection: Fate
I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.Collection: Hurt
Because friends have to be brutally honest with each other. I'd feel terrible if I didn't tell you what I was thinking, especially at a time like thisCollection: Honesty
Time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find... The future becomes insistent.Collection: Assets
The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.Collection: Beautiful
The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements.Collection: Dream
To be a tourist is to escape accountability.Collection: Accountability
How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?Collection: Lying
...Because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond necessity.Collection: Driven
She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn't working.Collection: Confused
People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.Collection: Children
In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere.Collection: Air
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.Collection: Dream
[I]n the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape. He is either on a horse or driving a car, depending, and either way he’s carrying a gun. This is one of the essential images in American mythology.Collection: Lonely
Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the sombre renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings.Collection: Kings
Explain me to myself, you’ll make me choke on my lunch. Feel sympathy for me, I’ll puke monkey blood on your understated shoes.Collection: Blood
Off-camera lives are unverifiable.Collection: Cameras
War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.Collection: Country
For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Plot
There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Real
Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.Collection: Technology
In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled.Collection: Dream
The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.Collection: World
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.Collection: Writing
Longing on a large scale makes history.Collection: Longing
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.Collection: Writing
Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.Collection: Hero
Facts are lonely things.Collection: Lonely
Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be.Collection: Source