Don DeLillo
People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.Collection: Past
Everything I've stated may prove to be total poppycock.... Perhaps time will tell. Perhaps time will do nothing of the kind.Collection: May
Digital clocks took the 'space' out of time.Collection: Space
I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.Collection: Brain
Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it.Collection: Dying
Coming and going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never. And I have seen what I will see. If I am where I will be. Because nothing comes between me.Collection: Leaving
Murray said, ´I don´t trust anybody´s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.´Collection: Country
My attitudes aren't directed toward characters at all. I don't feel sympathetic toward some characters, unsympathetic toward others. I don't love some characters, feel contempt for others. They have attitudes; I don't.Collection: Attitude
The more things I threw away, the more I found.Collection: Found
Was she naked?" Lasher said. "To the waist," Cotsakis said. "From which direction?" Lasher said.Collection: Naked
Being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do.Collection: Mind
The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.Collection: Office
I felt myself getting whiter... What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in?Collection: Mean
Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.Collection: Ruins
Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.Collection: Nice
Let's enjoy the aimless days while we still can.Collection: Enjoy
You feel sorry for yourself. You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is. You're lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash.Collection: Death
Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?' What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thingCollection: Anxiety
Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.Collection: Technique
The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire.Collection: Fire
Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire--not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.Collection: Sex
Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.Collection: Death
It is interesting ... how weapons reflect the soul of the maker.Collection: War
Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.Collection: Thinking
I think fiction recues history from its confusions.Collection: Thinking
War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.Collection: War
People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.Collection: Art
There is a balance, a kind of standoff between the time continuum and the human entity, our frail bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it's true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second.... We were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time.Collection: Daughter
Words are not necessary to one's experience of the true life.Collection: True Life
The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. (Point Omega)Collection: Saws
What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.Collection: Air
All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.Collection: Moving
Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours,man-hours, using labor more efficiently.Collection: Running
Sex finds us. Sex sees through us. That's why it's so shattering. It strips us of appearances.Collection: Sex
I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.Collection: One Day
The term itself--my life--is a desperate overstatement.Collection: Life Is
There are two categories of writers, it could be said: The author who is just a voice, and the one who is also creating a picture. I belong to the latter, because I have an acute visual sense.Collection: Two
I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next.Collection: Next
Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.Collection: Heart
What terrorists gain, novelists lose.Collection: Novelists
You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.Collection: Courage
holes are interesting. there are books about holes.Collection: Book
The difference between the world of pictures and the world of printed matter is extraordinary and hard to define. A picture is like the masses: a multitude of impressions. A book on the other hand, with its linear advance of words and characters seems to be connected to individual identity.Collection: Book
There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.Collection: Real
I never wanted to change the world. Norman Mailer wanted to, he set himself the task of changing the consciousness of our age. And I think he came pretty close, in the 1960s, to actually managing to do it. But me? No, no, I never wanted anything like that. I'm not Maileresque.Collection: World
Perhaps we've invented conspiracies for our own psychic well-being, to heal ourselves.Collection: Psychics
I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.Collection: Writing
It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space.Collection: Space
I think my work is influenced by the fact that we're living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times.Collection: Thinking