"California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom."
— Don DeLillo (White Noise)

"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."
— Don DeLillo (White Noise)

"The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream."
— Don DeLillo (White Noise)

"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."
— Don DeLillo

"American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous."
— Don DeLillo

"These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after."
— Don DeLillo (Falling Man: A Novel)

"The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear."
— Don DeLillo (White Noise)

"I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it."
— Don DeLillo (White Noise)

"Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn."
— Don DeLillo (Running Dog)

"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

"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."
— Don DeLillo (White Noise)

"I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble."
— Don DeLillo (Valparaiso)

"'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 (White Noise)

"Facts are lonely things"
— Don DeLillo (Libra)

"What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything."
— Don DeLillo (Don Delillo's White Noise)

"What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation."
— Don DeLillo

"Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets. "
— Don DeLillo (The Day Room)

"When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying."
— Don DeLillo (White Noise)

""The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe." "As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe...Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.""
— Don DeLillo (White Noise: Text and Criticism)

"As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive."
— Don DeLillo

"He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him."
— Don DeLillo

"The term itself--my life--is a desperate overstatement."
— Don DeLillo (Valparaiso: A Play)

"Within sixty-minute limits or one-hundred-yard limits or the limits of a game board, we can look for perfect moments or perfect structures. In my fiction I think this search sometimes turns out to be a cruel delusion.

No optimism, no pessimism. No homesickness for lost values or for the way fiction used to be written.

Everybody seems to know everything. Subjects surface and are totally exhausted in a matter of days or weeks, totally played out by the publishing industry and the broadcast industry. Nothing is too arcane to escape the treatment, the process. Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence. The writer is the man or woman who automatically takes a stance against his or her government. There are so many temptations for American writers to become part of the system and part of the structure that now, more than ever, we have to resist. American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous. Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That’s why so many of them are in jail.

Some people prefer to believe in conspiracy because they are made anxious by random acts. Believing in conspiracy is almost comforting because, in a sense, a conspiracy is a story we tell each other to ward off the dread of chaotic and random acts. Conspiracy offers coherence.

I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfillment in America... I see this desperation against the backdrop of brightly colored packages and products and consumer happiness and every promise that American life makes day by day and minute by minute everywhere we go.

Discarded pages mark the physical dimensions of a writer’s labor.

Film allows us to examine ourselves in ways earlier societies could not—examine ourselves, imitate ourselves, extend ourselves, reshape our reality. It permeates our lives, this double vision, and also detaches us, turns some of us into actors doing walk-throughs.

Every new novel stretches the term of the contract—let me live long enough to do one more book.

You become a serious novelist by living long enough."
— Don DeLillo

"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."
— Don DeLillo (Underworld)

"History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood -- read the speeches of Mussolini -- at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation. (82)"
— Don DeLillo (Underworld)

"He said, "The word for moonlight is moonlight.""
— Don DeLillo (The Body Artist: A Novel)

"Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain."
— Don DeLillo (Don Delillo's White Noise)

"“[I]n the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape. 
He is either on a horse or driving a car, depending, and either way he’s carrying a gun. 
This is one of the essential images in American mythology.” (interview)"
— Don DeLillo

""You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out" - Murray (WN 285)."
— Don DeLillo (White Noise: Text and Criticism)

"This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. - Murray (WN 285)"
— Don DeLillo (White Noise: Text and Criticism)

"The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps even something deeper like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works towards sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true."
— Don DeLillo (White Noise)

"He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world."
— Don DeLillo

"There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist? (155)"
— Don DeLillo (Cosmopolis)

"He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows."
— Don DeLillo (Mao II: A Novel)

"Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others."
— Don DeLillo (Cosmopolis)

"a traveler, the purer form, someone who collects impressions, dense anatomies of feeling but does not care to record them."
— Don DeLillo

"The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress."
— Don DeLillo (Underworld)

"Explain me to myself, you’ll make me choke on my lunch. Feel sympathy for me, I’ll puke monkey blood on your understated shoes."
— Don DeLillo (Valparaiso)

"Longing on a large scale makes history."
— Don DeLillo

""Do you think I'm somehow healthier because I don't know how to repress? Is it possible that constant fear is the natural state of man and that by living close to my fear I am actually doing something heroic, Murray?"
"Do you feel heroic?"
"No."
"Then you probably aren't.""
— Don DeLillo

"Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom."
— Don DeLillo (White Noise)

"Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide.
(Is it clear I was a hero of rock'n'roll?)
Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They were free of old saints and martyrs, but fearfully so, left with their own unlabeled flesh. Those without tickets didn't storm the barricades, and during a performance the boys and girls directly below us, scratching at the stage, were less murderous in their love of me, as if realizing finally that my death, to be authentic, must be self-willed- a succesful piece of instruction only if it occured by my own hand, preferrably ina foreign city. I began to think their education would not be complete until they outdid me as a teacher, until one day they merely pantomimed the kind of massive response the group was used to getting. As we performed they would dance, collapse, clutch each other, wave their arms, all the while making absolutely no sound. We would stand in the incandescent pit of a huge stadium filled with wildly rippling bodies, all totally silent. Our recent music, deprived of people's screams, was next to meaningless, and there would have been no choice but to stop playing. A profound joke it would have been. A lesson in something or other.
In Houston I left the group, saying nothing, and boarded a plane for New York City, that contaminated shrine, place of my birth. I knew Azarian would assume leadership of the band, his body being prettiest. As to the rest, I left them to their respective uproars- news media, promotion people, agents, accountants, various members of the managerial peerage. The public would come closer to understanding my disappearance than anyone else. It was not quite as total as the act they needed and nobody could be sure whether I was gone for good. For my closest followers, it foreshadowed a period of waiting. Either I'd return with a new language for them to speak or they'd seek a divine silence attendant to my own.
I took a taxi past the cemetaries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. new York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague. The cab driver was young, however, a freckled kid with a moderate orange Afro. I told him to take the tunnel.
"Is there a tunnel?" he said.""
— Don DeLillo

"At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her."
— Don DeLillo (The Body Artist: A Novel)

"Alfonse invested everything he did with a sense of all-consuming purpose. He knew four languages, had photographic memory, did complex mathematics in his head. He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it."
— Don DeLillo

"'Talent is everything. If you've got talent, nothing else matters. You can screw up your personal life something terrible. So what. If you've got talent, it's there in reserve. Anybody who has talent they know they have it and that's it. It's what makes you what you are. It tells you you're you. Talent is everything; sanity is nothing. I'm convinced of it. I think I had something once. I showed promise, didn't I? But I was too sane. I couldn't make the leap out of my own soul into the soul of the universe. That's the leap they all made. From Blake to Rimbaud. I don't write anything but checks. I read science fiction. I go on business trips to South Bend and Rochester. The one in Minnesota. Not Rochester, New York. Rochester, Minnesota. I couldn't make the leap.'"
— Don DeLillo (Americana)

"He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful."
— Don DeLillo

"Every time she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept on watching. The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone's, into some distance, out beyond the towers."
— Don DeLillo (Falling Man: A Novel)

"I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this
living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor,
some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world."
— Don DeLillo (Cosmopolis)

"People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's
mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life."
— Don DeLillo (Cosmopolis)

"There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this
light, which does not strictly exist?"
— Don DeLillo (Cosmopolis)