Don DeLillo's Quotes

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

I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.

In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.

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

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.

People will always make comparisons.

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

The future belongs to crowds.

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

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.

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

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

When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.

Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn't live his life in a certain way, this death is an introduction to an eternity of pain.

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.

I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?

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.

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.

People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

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?

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

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.

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

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