Don DeLillo
Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.Collection: Fear
We need time to lose interest in things.Collection: Needs
I'd like to lose interest in myself.Collection: Self
If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.Collection: Understanding
Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.Collection: Heart
Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.Collection: Week
The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.Collection: White Noise
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.Collection: Dying
Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first.Collection: Perception
Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.Collection: People
Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.Collection: Past
Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals.Collection: Book
In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too.Collection: Sleep
People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It's simply how we live.Collection: Thinking
Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of inter-communication is awe-inspiring.Collection: Communication
A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.Collection: Fall
Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.Collection: Giving
Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.Collection: Art
Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.Collection: Rushing
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.Collection: Average
Tourism is the march of stupidity.Collection: Stupidity
I've always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.Collection: Dangerous
To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity.Collection: Home
Technology is lust removed from nature.Collection: Technology
The world isn't going to be destroyed, but you don't feel safe anymore in your plane or train or office or auditorium.Collection: Office
Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.Collection: Art
It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.Collection: Lonely
It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.Collection: Believe
Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.Collection: Age
When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.Collection: Death
Clouds are no deterrent. Clouds intensify the drama, trap and shape the light.Collection: Drama
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.Collection: Ideas
When he died he would not end. The world would end.Collection: World
The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.Collection: Dream
He said, "The word for moonlight is moonlight.Collection: Moonlight
I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymoreCollection: Jobs
I think that the massive, overarching, interconnected systems of technology tend to make us a little insecure, somewhat pliable, and susceptible to half-beliefs.Collection: Insecure
the instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his armsCollection: Body
If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.Collection: Destiny
There is a world inside the world.Collection: World
The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now.Collection: Cells
Freud is finished, Einstein's next.Collection: Next
Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.Collection: Forever
People stress the violence. That's the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there's a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There's a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there's a satisfaction to the game that can't be duplicated. There's a harmony.Collection: Football
Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.Collection: Belief
Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.Collection: Fiction
Talent is more erotic when it's wasted.Collection: Erotic
Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don't let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth-century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?Collection: Light
I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let's not say men. Let's say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.Collection: Men