Quotes from Don DeLillo

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

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I'm not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

That's what it all comes down to in the end,' he said. 'A person spends his life saying good-bye to other people. How does he say good-bye to himself?

You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.

If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

Coming and going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never. And I have seen what I will see. If I am where I will be. Because nothing comes between me.

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.

You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.

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?

Time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential. The future becomes insistent. This is why something will happen soon, maybe today…to correct the acceleration of time. Bring nature back to normal, more or less.

There's the life and there's the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie? Everything seeks its own heightened version.

There is a world inside the world.

He said, The word for moonlight is moonlight.

I]n the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape. He is either on a horse or driving a car, depending, and either way he's carrying a gun. This is one of the essential images in American mythology.

Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another's care and protection.

The truth of the world is exhausting.

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.

People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It's simply how we live.

We] saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn't say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make?

Look past the violence. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.

Because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond necessity.

I would spend the rest of my life turning to speak to her.

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

Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets.