Best 383 quotes of Don Delillo on MyQuotes

Don Delillo

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    Don Delillo

    A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn't live his life in a certain way, this death is an introduction to an eternity of pain.

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    Don Delillo

    A dead afternoon in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.

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    Don Delillo

    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.

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    Don Delillo

    All human existence is a trick of light.

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    Don Delillo

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

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    Don Delillo

    All who have their reward on Earth, the fruits Of painful superstition and blind zeal, Naught seeking but the praise of men, here find Fit retribution, empty as their deeds.

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    Don Delillo

    America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.

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    Don Delillo

    American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.

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    Don Delillo

    America was and is the immigrant's dream.

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    Don Delillo

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

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    Don Delillo

    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?

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    Don Delillo

    A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require.

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    Don Delillo

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

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    Don Delillo

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

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    Don Delillo

    A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.

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    Don Delillo

    As belief shrinks from the world, it is more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.

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    Don Delillo

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

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    Don Delillo

    Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.

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    Don Delillo

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

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    Don Delillo

    A writer decides to follow some ideas and not others for reasons that aren't always clear to him. It's often a matter of intuition.

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    Don Delillo

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

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    Don Delillo

    Because friends have to be brutally honest with each other. I'd feel terrible if I didn't tell you what I was thinking, especially at a time like this

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    Don Delillo

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

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    Don Delillo

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

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    Don Delillo

    Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.

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    Don Delillo

    Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.

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    Don Delillo

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

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    Don Delillo

    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.

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    Don Delillo

    Certainly I've never tried to imagine what the future will hold. It's a hopeless endeavor to try to do such a thing.

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    Don Delillo

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

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    Don Delillo

    days like this. i look at you and feel electric. tell me you don't feel it too."_Eric Packer

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    Don Delillo

    Digital clocks took the 'space' out of time.

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    Don Delillo

    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

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    Don Delillo

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

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    Don Delillo

    Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.

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    Don Delillo

    Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.

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    Don Delillo

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

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    Don Delillo

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

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    Don Delillo

    Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.

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    Don Delillo

    Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

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    Don Delillo

    Everything I've stated may prove to be total poppycock.... Perhaps time will tell. Perhaps time will do nothing of the kind.

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    Don Delillo

    Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it.

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    Don Delillo

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

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    Don Delillo

    Evil is movement towards void.

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    Don Delillo

    Explain me to myself, you’ll make me choke on my lunch. Feel sympathy for me, I’ll puke monkey blood on your understated shoes.

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    Don Delillo

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

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    Don Delillo

    Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the sombre renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings.

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    Don Delillo

    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.

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    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.

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    Don Delillo

    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.