Don DeLillo quotes

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version. (Don DeLillo)
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. View quote
Don DeLillo
The future belongs to crowds. View quote
Don DeLillo
Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom. View quote
Don DeLillo
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. View quote
Don DeLillo
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. View quote
Don DeLillo
I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it. View quote
Don DeLillo
It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point. View quote
Don DeLillo
All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. View quote
Don DeLillo
In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices. View quote
Don DeLillo
He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it. (Don DeLillo)
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. View quote
Don DeLillo
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. View quote
Don DeLillo
War is the ultimate realization of modern technology. View quote
Don DeLillo
The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities. View quote
Don DeLillo
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. View quote
Don DeLillo
American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous. View quote
Don DeLillo
Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S. Why not use it? View quote
Don DeLillo
The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream. View quote
Don DeLillo
The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now. View quote
Don DeLillo
It occured to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain. (Don DeLillo)
You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself. View quote
Don DeLillo
I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing. View quote
Don DeLillo
Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets. View quote
Don DeLillo
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? View quote
Don DeLillo