Don delillo quotes

Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.

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

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

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?

Longing on a large scale makes history.

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.

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?

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

People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It's simply how we live.

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

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.

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

When he died he would not end. The world would end.

Something lurked inside the truth.

He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.

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.

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

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.

Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination.

Technology is lust removed from nature.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

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?

I've always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.

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.

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

The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.

In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.

The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

Facts are lonely things.

It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.

The world isn't going to be destroyed, but you don't feel safe anymore in your plane or train or office or auditorium.

If an idea seems to find its way towards a stage setting, that's the direction I take. I don't know if I'm trying to achieve anything other than to follow an idea on to the page.

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

All human existence is a trick of light.

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

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.

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

Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?

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.

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.

I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfilment in America.

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

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

Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past.

War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.

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

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.

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.

Tourism is the march of stupidity.

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

Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.

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

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

The future belongs to crowds.

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

This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. - Murray (WN 285)

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

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

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

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.

Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?

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

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

To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity.

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.

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.

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

Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.

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

Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

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.

What did it mean, the first time, a thinking creature looked deeply into another's eyes? Did it take a hundred thousand years before this happened or it was the first thing they did, transcendingly, the thing that made them higher, made them modern, the gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls?

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

Pain is just another form of information.

Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.

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

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

Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.

Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.

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

I'd like to lose interest in myself.

Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.

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.

Murray said, ´I don´t trust anybody´s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.´

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

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.

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

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

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.

Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals.

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.

There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist? (155)

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.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

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

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.

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.

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

When I work I have a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words I'm making. I use a machine with larger than average letters: the bigger the better.

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

Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of inter-communication is awe-inspiring.

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.

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.

Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.

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

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

People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.

Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.

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.

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.

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.

In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too.

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

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

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

May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.

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.

We need time to lose interest in things.

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

Clouds are no deterrent. Clouds intensify the drama, trap and shape the light.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.