Quotes By Don DeLillo

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.

Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.

I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it.

May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.

Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.

The future belongs to crowds.

I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.

It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture.

The language of my books has shaped me as a man.

In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.

I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.

Rushdie is a hostage.

American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.

One 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.

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?

I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

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.

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

There's never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President.

There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

America was and is the immigrant's dream.

People will always make comparisons.

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.

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

It occured to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.