Quotes from Don DeLillo

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.

Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving.

How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?

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.

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

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

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

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.

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

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.

I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.

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

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

The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.

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

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

In the subways, in many of the streets, in corners of the park at night, contact could be dangerous. Contact was not a word or a touch but the air that flashed between strangers.

Shit is universal no matter which language.

History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood -- read the speeches of Mussolini -- at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation.

He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.

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

A fact is innocent until someone wants it; then it become intelligence.

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

At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her.