Don DeLillo
Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera? Because our lives are a vivid situation.Collection: Opera
Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake. And I'm the actor made up for the laying-out.Collection: Powerful
Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.Collection: Fun
I don't consider myself paranoid at all. I think I see things exactly as they are.Collection: Thinking
I was never either pro-culture or counter-culture. I was in a kind of middle state.Collection: Counter Culture
In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending. So for much of the period in which I'm writing, I'm waiting to understand what's going to happen next, and how and where it's going to happen. In some cases, fairly early in the process, I do know how a book will end. But most of the time, not at all, and in this particular case, many questions are still unanswered, even though I've been working for months.Collection: Book
He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.Collection: Pain
At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her.Collection: Stars
You live in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God.Collection: Heaven
He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.Collection: Art
The family was an art ... and the dinner table was the place it found expression.Collection: Family
The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.Collection: Life
That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.Collection: Apples
Isn't death the boundary we need?Collection: Death
Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.Collection: Integrity
They passed out of the shade beneath the eaves and flew into sunglare and silence and it was an action she only partly saw, elusive and mutely beautiful, the birds so sunstruck they were consumed by light, disembodied, turned into something sheer and fleet and scatter-bright.Collection: Beautiful
In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.Collection: Editing
The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you've killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it's ordinary murder.Collection: War
It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.Collection: People
There are times when you want to stop working at faith and just be washed in a blowing wind that tells you everything.Collection: Faith
The dead have a presence.Collection: Death
In the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape.Collection: Lonely
He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.Collection: Thinking
In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.Collection: Mean
Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?Collection: Serious
When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.Collection: House
People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units.Collection: People
Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.Collection: Prayer
The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.Collection: World
There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist? (155)Collection: Stars
Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.Collection: Mean
This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. - Murray (WN 285)Collection: Technology
I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfilment in America.Collection: America
People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.Collection: People
All human existence is a trick of light.Collection: Light
Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.Collection: Mean
It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.Collection: Book
What did it mean, the first time, a thinking creature looked deeply into another's eyes? Did it take a hundred thousand years before this happened or it was the first thing they did, transcendingly, the thing that made them higher, made them modern, the gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls?Collection: Lonely
Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination.Collection: Fascination
Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.Collection: Love
I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.Collection: Writing
Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past.Collection: Past
why something and not nothing? why music and not noise?Collection: Noise
Stories have no point if they don’t absorb our terror.Collection: Stories
There’s always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.Collection: Firsts
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: Reading
If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we’re talking about when we use the word “identity” has reached an end.Collection: Reading