Don DeLillo Quotations | Page 4

I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.

I was never either pro-culture or counter-culture. I was in a kind of middle state.

Pain is just another form of information.

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.

That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.

I marched and I protested against the war in Vietnam, along with many, many thousands of others. But I never quite understood the bombs that were placed in science labs or office buildings.

If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

I am very unmusical. I can't carry a tune. I would never be able to play an instrument.

Longing on a large scale makes history.

Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.

If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

The music I like best is kind of frozen in my mind from the Sixties and Seventies. I still listen to the same jazz music I listened to when I was eighteen years old, and like and admire it just as much.

In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.

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

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

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

Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

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

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.

It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

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

I think my work is influenced by the fact that we're living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times.

And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next.

There are two categories of writers, it could be said: The author who is just a voice, and the one who is also creating a picture. I belong to the latter, because I have an acute visual sense.

Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals.

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

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

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.

The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.

I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

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

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself.

Don't you realize that as long as you have to sit down to pee, you'll never be a dominant force in the world? You'll never be a convincing technocrat or middle manager. Because people will know. She's in there sitting down.