Quotes by Don DeLillo

“A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the sma...”

“Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although ...”

“I'd never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be "only human," subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of...”

“Memory is the faculty of absolution. Men developed memories to ease their disquiet over things they did as men. The deep past is the only innocence and therefore necessary to retain.”

“Only absences were fully shared.”

“Everybody wants to own the end of the world.”

“What you see is not what wee se. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.”

“Within sixty-minute limits or one-hundred-yard limits or the limits of a game board, we can look for perfect moments or perfect structures. In my fiction I think this search sometimes turns out to ...”

“He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.”

“The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.”

“Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if ...”

“Air travel reminds us who we are. Its 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, c...”

“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.”

“When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I dont have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and p...”

“I like simple men and complicated women.”

“I am the false character that follows the name around.”

“Mans guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.”

“This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement...”

“We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED ...”

“A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.”