Don DeLillo > Quotes

“The future belongs to crowds.”
― Don DeLillo, Mao II

“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

“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

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

“California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows.”
― Don DeLillo, Mao II

“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

“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

“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.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“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

“Facts are lonely things”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“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

“I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.”
― Don DeLillo, Valparaiso

“These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.”
― Don DeLillo, Falling Man

“Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.”
― Don DeLillo, Running Dog

“American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.”
― 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

“What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.”
― Don DeLillo

“Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“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

“Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets. ”
― Don DeLillo, The Day Room

“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

“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 Critical: Text and Criticism

“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

“The more things I threw away, the more I found.”
― Don DeLillo, Don DeLillo's White Noise

“It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Let's enjoy the aimless days while we still can.”
― Don DeLillo, Don DeLillo's White Noise

“Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“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

“All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. ”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong. (Point Omega)”
― Don DeLillo

“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

“Shit is universal no matter which language.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.”
― Don DeLillo

“It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams”
― Don DeLillo, Americana

“Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

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

“I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“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

“Longing on a large scale makes history.”
― Don DeLillo

“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 Critical: Text and Criticism

“Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory. ”
― Don DeLillo, Americana

“Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.”
― Don DeLillo, Conversations with Don Delillo

“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

“Murray said, ´I don´t trust anybody´s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.´”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“it's not the sex you think i've had. it's the sex i want. that's what you smell on me. because the more i look at you, the more i know about us both.and the more i want to have sex with you. because there's a certain kind of sex that has an element of cleansing. it's the antidote to disillusion. the counterpoison."_Eric Packer”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“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, White Noise

“Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.”
― Don DeLillo, Mao II