Don DeLillo Quotes - Page 4

My attitudes aren't directed toward characters at all. I don't feel sympathetic toward some characters, unsympathetic toward others. I don't love some characters, feel contempt for others. They have attitudes; I don't.

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.

Was she naked?" Lasher said. "To the waist," Cotsakis said. "From which direction?" Lasher said.

The more things I threw away, the more I found.

Being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do.

The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.

I felt myself getting whiter... What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in?

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.

Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

Let's enjoy the aimless days while we still can.

You feel sorry for yourself. You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is. You're lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash.

Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.

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

The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire.

Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire--not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.

Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.

It is interesting ... how weapons reflect the soul of the maker.

There is a balance, a kind of standoff between the time continuum and the human entity, our frail bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it's true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second.... We were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time.

War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.

People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.

Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.

Words are not necessary to one's experience of the true life.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.