Quotes by Don DeLillo

“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 ...”

“Then theyre always trying to sell you something. Everything is based on forcing people to buy. If you cant buy what theyre selling, youre a zero in the system.”

“All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of childrens games. We edge nearer death every ti...”

“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 rea...”

“The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.”

“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.”

“Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There must al...”

“The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.”

“Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.”

“Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. Theres an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, whats left is terror. This is th...”

“I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that...”

“And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor's yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice, or pigg...”

“How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take the pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion, making something brainy and rule-bound and s...”

“Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your causal gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged wav...”

“It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience...For that reason, reading a novel is potentially a significant act. Because there are so many varieties of ...”

“The painted aircraft took on sunlight and pulse. Sweeps of color, bands and spatters, airy washes, the force of saturated lightthe whole thing oddly personal, a sense of one painters hand moved by ...”

“I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.”

“Once out of the mailroom, I began to learn more about fear. As soonas fear begins to ascend, anatomically, from the pit of the stomach to thethroat and brain, from fear of violence to the more name...”

“I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.”

“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?”