Don DeLillo Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

Pain is just another form of information.

It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.

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

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