Don DeLillo Quotes - Page 2

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?

You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

Facts are lonely things.

Longing on a large scale makes history.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

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.

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.

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.

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.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.

Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be.

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.

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.

I'd like to lose interest in myself.

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.

We need time to lose interest in things.

A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.

Something lurked inside the truth.

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.

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

Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first.

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.