Don DeLillo quotes:

I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

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

It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture.

Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.

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?

I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.

The future belongs to crowds.

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

Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.

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

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

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.

I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.

America was and is the immigrant's dream.

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.

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

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

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."

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.

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.

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

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.

He was thinking about automated teller machines. The term was aged and burdened by its own historical memory. It worked at cross-purposes, unable to escape the inferences of fuddled human personnel and jerky moving parts. The term was part of the process that the device was meant to replace. It was anti-futuristic, so cumbrous and mechanical that even the acronym seemed dated.

I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds."

People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being."

When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.

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

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.

Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.

I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read. I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

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

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.

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.

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.

He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.

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

We feel certain that the extraterrestrial message is a mathematical code of some kind. Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality.

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

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.

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.

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

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

There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.

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.

The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there,' she said. 'This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.

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

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

I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography.

I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.

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.

It's impossible to write about the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath without taking note of twenty-five years of paranoia which has collected around that event.

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

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

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

To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

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

In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.

War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.

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

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.

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

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

One 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.

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

I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.

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.

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

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.

Rushdie is a hostage.

She was taking a round of medications, a mystical wheel, the ritualistic design of the hours and days in tablets and capsules, in colors, shapes and numbers.

Las puestas de sol no tienen prisa, y nosotros tampoco. El cielo se encuentra sometido a un sortilegio poderoso y estructurado.

I am the false character that follows the name around.

Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.

Everything was on television last night

And I knew with total certainty that a protection factor of fifteen was the highest level of sunblock scientifically possible. Now they were selling me a thirty.

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.

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

Any curly-haired boy can write windswept ballads. You have to crush people's heads. That's the only way to make those fuckers listen.

Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I wouldn't say that to a dying man.

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

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

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.

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

Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don't let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth-century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?

Tourism is the march of stupidity.

To be a tourist is to escape accountability.

In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are.

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.

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?

Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.

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

In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.

It occured to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

There's never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President.

I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?

I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.

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

I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.

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.

I donâ??t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

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

I never wanted to change the world.

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

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.

In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary from book to book. But in many books, there is a colloquialism of address. The characters will speak in a quite idiosyncratic way sometimes.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

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

I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.

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.

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

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