Quotes from Don DeLillo

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

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

The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw.

Freud is finished, Einstein's next.

Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

Because we're suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information.

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

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.

Maybe what has to happen is that the individual must allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice, the single direction. This is what makes things inevitable. You use the restrictions and penalties they invent to make yourself stronger. History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin.

Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.

If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.

Off-camera lives are unverifiable.

World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.

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.

If you don't have the grace and wit to die early, you are forced to vanish, to hide as if in shame and apology.

To be a tourist is to escape accountability.

It was agreeable to her, the smell of tobacco. It was part of her knowledge of his body. It was the aura of the man, a residue of smoke and unbroken habit, a dimension in the night, and she lapped it off the curled gray hairs on his chest and tasted it in his mouth. It was who he was in the dark, cigarettes and mumbled sleep and a hundred other things nameable and not.

They've grown comfortable with their money,' I said. 'They genuinely believe they're entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.

It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

Sounds like a boring life. I hope it lasts forever, she said.

Some people are lucky. They become who they are supposed to be. This did not happen to me until I met (your mother). One day we started to talk and it never stopped, this conversation.

I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books.

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

That clean but lonely feeling when there are no other cars. The traffic lights changing just for you.