Quotes from Don DeLillo

The language of my books has shaped me as a man.

I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let's not say men. Let's say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.

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.

Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror. Today, the men who shape and inflence human consciousness are the terrorists.

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?

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

Technology is lust removed from nature.

We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identicalstructures.

The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings.

You live in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God.

I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.

Longing on a large scale makes history.

... there was an honesty inherent in bulkiness if it is just the right amount.

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

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

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

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?

People will always make comparisons.

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

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.

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

The future belongs to crowds.

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

I marched and I protested against the war in Vietnam, along with many, many thousands of others. But I never quite understood the bombs that were placed in science labs or office buildings.