Quotes by Don DeLillo

“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 ...”

“Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S. Why not use it?”

“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...”

“I think what'll happen in the not-too-distant future is that we'll have humane wars. Each side agrees to use clean bombs. And each side agrees to limit the amount of megatons he uses. In other word...”

“Of course the humanistic mind crumbles at the whole idea. It's the most hideous thing in the world to these people that such ideas even have to be mentioned. But the thing won't go away. The thing ...”

“War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.”

“I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing.”

“I had centered myself, learning of the existence of an interior motion, a shift in the levels from isolation to solitude to wordlessness to immobility. When Opel occupied that center I became the t...”

“Evil is movement towards void.”

“I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.”

“If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.”

“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 sp...”

“Who will die first?”

“I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread.”

“All plots tend to move deathwards. This is the nature of plots.”

“Every disaster made us wish for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.”

“To become a crowd is to keep out death.”

“I heard a noise, faint, monotonous, white.”

“The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps even something deep...”

“It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.”