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Don DeLillo Quotes | Quotes said by Don DeLillo

  • Don DeLillo Quote #1

    ?As pessoas nao vão morrer. Não é esse o credo da nova cultura? As pessoas vão ser absorvidas em fluxos de informações. Não entendo nada disso. Os computadores vão morrer. Já estão morrendo na sua forma atual. Estão praticamente mortos como unidades distintas. Uma caixa, uma tela, um teclado. Eles estão se dissolvendo na textura da vida cotidiana. (...) Até a palavra computador parece retrógrada e burra.


  • Don DeLillo Quote #2

    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 smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #3

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

  • Don DeLillo Quote #4

    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.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #5

    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 piggyback races on the weedy lawn, and it's your voice you hear, essentially, under the glimmerglass sky, and you look at the things in the room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in light, the thick lived tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measures of experience in a random glance, the monk's candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils, skewed all crazy, and the plied lives of the simplest surface, the slabbed butter melting on the crumbled bun, and the yellow of the yellow of the pencils, and you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow, its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hail and farewell, a word that carries the sunlit ardor of an object deep in drenching noon, the argument of binding touch, but it's only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive--a word that spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city and out across the dreaming bournes and orchards to the solitary hills.

    Peace.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #6

    Any curly-haired boy can write windswept ballads. You have to crush people's heads. That's the only way to make those fuckers listen.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #7

    As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or terror in a lonely place, the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind. As a mathematician he was free from subjection to reality, free to impose his ideas and designs on his own test environment. The only valid standard for his work, its critical point (zero or infinity), was the beauty it possessed, the deft strength of his mathematical reasoning. THe work's ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was his own principle of intelligence or individual consciousness; his identity, in short. This was the infalling trap, the source of art's private involvement with obsession and despair, neither more nor less than the artist's self-containment, a mental state that led to storms of overwork and extended stretches of depression, that brought on indifference to life and at times the need to regurgitate it, to seek the level of expelled matter. Of course, the sense at the end of a serious effort, if the end is reached successfully, is one of lyrical exhilaration. There is air to breathe and a place to stand. The work gradually reveals its attachment to the charged particles of other minds, men now historical, the rediscovered dead; to the main structure of mathematical thought; perhaps even to reality itself, the so-called sum of things. It is possible to stand in time's pinewood dust and admire one's own veronicas and pavanes.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #8

    As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #9

    Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #10

    Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #11

    But then it came time for me to make my journey—into America. [... N]o coincidence that my first novel is called Americana. That became my subject, the subject that shaped my work. When I get a French translation of one of my books that says 'translated from the American', I think, 'Yes, that's exactly right.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #12

    California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #13

    Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #14

    Do you know why I believe in the novel? It’s a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street. I believe this, George. Some nameless drudge, some desperado with barely a nurtured dream can sit down and find his voice and luck out and do it. Something so angelic it makes your jaw hang open. The spray of talent, the spray of ideas. One thing unlike another, one voice unlike the next. Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints. And this is what you want to destroy.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #15

    Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?'

    What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing

  • Don DeLillo Quote #16

    Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #17

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

  • Don DeLillo Quote #18

    Everything was on television last night

  • Don DeLillo Quote #19

    Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #20

    God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the .45 to even things up.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #21

    He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #22

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

  • Don DeLillo Quote #23

    How language is webbed in the senses. Out of sand-blazed brilliance into quirky minds such as his, into touch, taste and fragrance. He thought he'd linger just a bit longer, let the bath take total hold, ease and alleviate, before he put on clothes and entered the complex boxes where people do their living.
    Nothing fits the body so well as water.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #24

    How many times do two people have to fuck before one of them deserves to die? _Eric Packer

  • Don DeLillo Quote #25

    How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?

  • Don DeLillo Quote #26

    I am the false character that follows the name around.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #27

    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 could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #28

    I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #29

    I like simple men and complicated women.

  • Don DeLillo Quote #30

    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.

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