Don DeLillo quote: "I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory."

I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.
DON DELILLO

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he fin...
DON DELILLO

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work throu...
DON DELILLO

I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginnin...
DON DELILLO

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what ...
DON DELILLO

A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn't live his li...
DON DELILLO

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to ...
DON DELILLO

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

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

I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to un...
DON DELILLO

The future belongs to crowds.
DON DELILLO

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and t...
DON DELILLO

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the id...
DON DELILLO

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.
DON DELILLO

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

America was and is the immigrant's dream.
DON DELILLO

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract ...
DON DELILLO

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time whe...
DON DELILLO

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

This is what comes from the wrong kind of attentiveness. People get brain fade. This is because they...
DON DELILLO

A naked woman was amazing.

He'd never seen it this way, in full light, without half-off c...
DON DELILLO

Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age ...
DON DELILLO

America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame Ame...
DON DELILLO

I think it's only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of c...
DON DELILLO

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the ma...
DON DELILLO

Hardship makes the world obscure.
DON DELILLO

Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but b...
DON DELILLO

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when th...
DON DELILLO

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the tw...
DON DELILLO

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's t...
DON DELILLO

People stress the violence. That's the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance....
DON DELILLO

The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustai...
DON DELILLO

If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless...
DON DELILLO

The future belongs to crowds
DON DELILLO

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all a...
DON DELILLO

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

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of i...
DON DELILLO

It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of ind...
DON DELILLO

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

People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furth...
DON DELILLO

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is t...
DON DELILLO

There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive...
DON DELILLO

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

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

How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a cen...
DON DELILLO

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.
DON DELILLO

To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do ...
DON DELILLO

Don't you realize that as long as you have to sit down to pee, you'll never be a dominant force in t...
DON DELILLO

Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
DON DELILLO

Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now...
DON DELILLO

In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with...
DON DELILLO

Bemoan technology all you want. It expands your self-esteem and connects you in your well-pressed su...
DON DELILLO

People weren’t saying Oh wow anymore. They were saying No way instead and she wondered if there wa...
DON DELILLO

It’s the kind of human junk that deepens the landscape, makes it sadder and lonelier and places a ...
DON DELILLO

Il libro si adatta alla mano, si adatta all'individuo. Il modo in cui tieni in mano un libro e giri ...
DON DELILLO

It's not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to de...
DON DELILLO

How memory conspires with objects of human craft, pressing time flat, inciting a tender reminiscence...
DON DELILLO

you never consider but might find amazing if you did, how the details of contact, the eye movement a...
DON DELILLO

Non chiamai Marion. Provai un senso di solitudine, in mancanza di parole migliori, ma in effetti è ...
DON DELILLO

He drove into the spewing smoke of acres of burning truck tires and the planes descended and the tra...
DON DELILLO

And I knew with total certainty that a protection factor of fifteen was the highest level of sunbloc...
DON DELILLO

That's why he was here, to surrender himself to longing, to listen to his host recite the anecdotal ...
DON DELILLO

He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue...
DON DELILLO

Civilization did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting scenes on bronze gates and whispe...
DON DELILLO

I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tong...
DON DELILLO

I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives. That is ...
DON DELILLO

The grasp of objects that bind us to some betokening.
DON DELILLO

A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the e...
DON DELILLO

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I'm not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay...
DON DELILLO

Marian and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We ...
DON DELILLO

You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.
DON DELILLO

Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and ...
DON DELILLO

History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed...
DON DELILLO

My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simp...
DON DELILLO

It is all falling indelibly into the past.
DON DELILLO

The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a ...
DON DELILLO

Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. Yo...
DON DELILLO

Longing on a large scale makes history.
DON DELILLO

I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling ...
DON DELILLO

I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.
DON DELILLO

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For...
DON DELILLO

The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.
DON DELILLO

We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White f...
DON DELILLO

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's...
DON DELILLO

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's t...
DON DELILLO

Thousands stand and chant. Around them in the world, people ride escalators going up and sneak secre...
DON DELILLO

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lov...
DON DELILLO

I do not want to talk about it.
DON DELILLO

Alfonse invested everything he did with a sense of all-consuming purpose. He knew four languages, ha...
DON DELILLO

Once out of the mailroom, I began to learn more about fear. As soon
as fear begins to ascend, a...
DON DELILLO

Embodied in objects was a partial sense of sharing. They didn't lift their eyes from their respectiv...
DON DELILLO

These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundame...
DON DELILLO

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

You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to k...
DON DELILLO

I am aware that when we see something, we are getting only a measure of information, a sense, an ink...
DON DELILLO

...Take the leap, they said. Live the billionaire's myth of immortality. And why not now, I thought....
DON DELILLO

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

Another one says she has asnap-off crotch. What do you think she means by that? I'm a little worried...
DON DELILLO

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular ex...
DON DELILLO

We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now.
DON DELILLO

The son of a bitch believes.
DON DELILLO

In the subways, in many of the streets, in corners of the park at night, contact could be dangerous....
DON DELILLO

Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.
DON DELILLO

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

There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in th...
DON DELILLO

The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or...
DON DELILLO

For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thin...
DON DELILLO

I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own distasters.
DON DELILLO

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somew...
DON DELILLO

Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something ...
DON DELILLO

Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.
DON DELILLO

This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It th...
DON DELILLO

Maybe when we die, the first thing we’ll say is, 'I know this feeling. I was here before.
DON DELILLO

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.
DON DELILLO

Murray said, ´I don´t trust anybody´s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfac...
DON DELILLO

It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of ...
DON DELILLO

Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition?...
DON DELILLO

He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dis...
DON DELILLO

The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe." "As belief shrinks...
DON DELILLO

He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or ...
DON DELILLO

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

What good is a preciousness base...
DON DELILLO

That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the de...
DON DELILLO

Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatura...
DON DELILLO

When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to ...
DON DELILLO

It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.
DON DELILLO

The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life tha...
DON DELILLO

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there ...
DON DELILLO

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.
DON DELILLO

It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point...
DON DELILLO

The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.
DON DELILLO

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone wa...
DON DELILLO

I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.
DON DELILLO

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet in...
DON DELILLO

But then it came time for me to make my journey—into America. [... N]o coincidence that my first n...
DON DELILLO

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.
DON DELILLO

We are not native. We have no generations of Americans behind us. We have roots elsewhere. We are lo...
DON DELILLO

Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now.
DON DELILLO

Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's the...
DON DELILLO

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three o...
DON DELILLO

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love t...
DON DELILLO

Within sixty-minute limits or one-hundred-yard limits or the limits of a game board, we can look for...
DON DELILLO

Air travel reminds us who we are. It’s the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The pr...
DON DELILLO

When times are bad, people feel compelled to overeat.
DON DELILLO

It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city. All the guiding principles that m...
DON DELILLO

What was the barn like before it was photographed?' he said. 'What did it look like, how was it diff...
DON DELILLO

How language is webbed in the senses. Out of sand-blazed brilliance into quirky minds such as his, i...
DON DELILLO

Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements...
DON DELILLO

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity o...
DON DELILLO

He told me that I hadn't done anything yet. Hadn't lived yet. All you do is pass the time, he said.
DON DELILLO

The plane had lost power in all three engines, dropped from thirty-four thousand feet to twelve thou...
DON DELILLO

A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself.
DON MARQUIS

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move th...
DON MARQUIS

One of the most important things to remember about infant care is: don't change diapers in midst...
DON MARQUIS

An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience.
DON MARQUIS

In all systems of theology the devil figures as a male person. Yes, it is women who keep the church ...
DON MARQUIS

Of middle age the best that can be said is that a middle-aged person has likely learned how to have ...
DON MARQUIS

An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it.
DON MARQUIS

Every cloud has its silver lining but it is sometimes a little difficult to get it to the mint.
DON MARQUIS

In order to influence a child, one must be careful not to be that child's parent or grandparent.
DON MARQUIS

A hypocrite is a person who - but who isn't?
DON MARQUIS

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'
DON MARQUIS

Ours is a world where people don't know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get...
DON MARQUIS

I understand what's it like to work all week and on Friday night just want to go and leave your ...
DON CHEADLE

Luck is the by-product of busting your fanny.
DON SUTTON

Hypocrisy is the mother of all evil and racial prejudice is still her favourite child.
DON KING

Sometimes you get the best light from a burning bridge.
DON HENLEY

Who picks your clothes - Stevie Wonder?
DON RICKLES

When writing, I split my time between my chambers and my satellite office: my neighborhood Chick-fil...
DON WILLETT

When I take a black-and-white portrait, it's not particularly meant to please you. It's mean...
DON MCCULLIN

Our Constitution exists to secure individual freedom, the essential condition of human flourishing. ...
DON WILLETT

I think the work that they do and the style of 3D graphics is absolutely fabulous and I think it'...
DON BLUTH

A man with a briefcase can steal millions more than any man with a gun.
DON HENLEY

I didn't just hear music. It seemed as if I were part of the music.
DON PIPER

what man calls civilizationalways results in desertsman is never on the squarehe uses up the fat and...
DON MARQUIS

ihave often noticed thatancestors never boastof the descendants who boastof ancestors i wouldrather ...
DON MARQUIS

If a bullfrog had wings it wouldn't bump his behind every time he hopped.
DON KING

The body responds to a calorie deficit by slowing down the metabolism and burning muscle tissue. Tha...
DON KARDONG

In the old days, before there was such a thing as film schools, directors learned the camera by watc...
DON AMECHE

I could have played more complex stuff. I could have been a busier player. But that's not what I...
DON HENLEY

My career is one of people involvement. I'm a promoter of the people, by the people, for the peo...
DON KING

If you work for and eventually lead a company, understand that companies have multiple stakeholders ...
DON TAPSCOTT

One thing I never want to be accused of is not working.
DON SHULA

The person who has no enemies has no followers.
DON PIATT

Las Vegas is the boiling pot of entertainment.
DON RICKLES

There is nothing so habit-forming as money.
DON MARQUIS

Many a man spanks his children for the things his own father should have spanked out of him.
DON MARQUIS

So unlucky that he runs into accidents which started out to happen to somebody else.
DON MARQUIS

A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself.
DON MARQUIS

It takes all sorts of people to make the underworld.
DON MARQUIS

Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long e...
DON MARQUIS

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose?
DON MARQUIS

Bob Hope was totally regimented. I go in and say a line like, 'Hi Bob' and I'd have to d...
DON RICKLES

Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.
DON MARQUIS

The 2 Major US Political parties have divided and conquered the US Voters by making elections about ...
DON MASHAK

Speaking to how elections are framed in the USA: It is not Republican vs Democrat, nor Conservative ...
DON MASHAK

OZOCRACY - Watch the spectacle (or divisive, polarizing issue) we, the politicians, have created or ...
DON MASHAK

Dad wouldn't let me fool with his guitar much, because I'm left-handed, and I'd pick it ...
DON EVERLY

Old men need applause too
DON EVERLY

Good pitchers, after a tough outing, bounce back. Real good pitchers don't let too many poor gam...
DON COOPER

If you make people think they're thinking they'll love you: but if you really make them think, they'...
DON MARQUIS

I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

Copied!

Don DeLillo

I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

Don DeLillo

Share:

Related

More Don DeLillo