Don DeLillo Quotes - Page 7

Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.

It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at.

First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there's a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger.

We surrounded ourselves with smoke and loud noise. That's the way we chose to live. I'm prepared to defend it.

Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets.' (20)

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

Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours,man-hours, using labor more efficiently.

People will always make comparisons.

The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.

We commit our crimes at night and reveal ourselves in the high noon of studio lights.

I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.

It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.'

There are no amateurs in the world of children.

Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now.

A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.

Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.

Evil is movement towards void.

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.

The term itself--my life--is a desperate overstatement.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.

Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into the night, if you stand a while and look.

A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.

The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. (Point Omega)

You become a serious novelist by living long enough.