Don DeLillo Quotes - Page 6

why something and not nothing? why music and not noise?

You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night.

There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.

The future belongs to crowds.

I do think that in the near future, if it hasn't happened already, people will be able to use technology to design their own novels, perhaps with individuals themselves as the main character. In other words, everything is being individualized and narrowed.

Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.

Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets.

It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.

To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong. (Point Omega)

It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line.

I am very unmusical. I can't carry a tune. I would never be able to play an instrument.

The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it.

One of my earliest memories as a reader - I don't know how old I was, quite young - was a poem of his, called "Fog," and I remember the first verse, "The fog comes / on little cat feet".

If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

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.

You gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.

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)

For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

Famous people don't want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there's something crawling in their clothes.

World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.

The best moments involve a loss of control. It's a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often - completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages - I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.