Quotes from Don DeLillo

What is a nebulous mass, just out of idle curiosity? A possible growth in the body. And it's called nebulous because you can't get a clear picture of it. We get very clear pictures. The imaging block takes the clearest pictures humanly possible. It's called a nebulous mass because it has no definite shape, form, or limits. What can it do in terms of worst-case scenario contingencies? Cause a person to die. Speak English, for God's sake. I despise this modern jargon.

That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.

The city is a device for measuring time.

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

In committing a work to memory we make it safe from decay. It stands untouched. Children memorize parts of stories their parents tell them. They want the same story again and again. Don't change a word or they get terribly upset. This is the unchanged narrative every culture needs in order to survive.

The art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way.

Vanity is a defensive quality. it contains an element of fear.

It's not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.

You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal existence on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.

What did it mean, the first time, a thinking creature looked deeply into another's eyes? Did it take a hundred thousand years before this happened or it was the first thing they did, transcendingly, the thing that made them higher, made them modern, the gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls?

The vast and terrible depth. "Of course," he said. "The inexhaustibility." "I understand." "The whole huge nameless thing." "Yes, absolutely." "The massive darkness." "Certainly, certainly." "The whole terrible endless hugeness." "I know exactly what you mean.

Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure.

She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear. Eric Packer about Vija Kinski

War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.

I sat on the front steps alone, waiting for a sense of ease and peace to settle in the air around me. A woman passing on the street said, ´A decongestant, an antihistamine, a cough suppressant, a pain reliever.´

I think it's a mistake to lose one's sense of death, even one's fear of death. Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.

you never consider but might find amazing if you did, how the details of contact, the eye movement and hand waves, the smiles of recognition, the catch-up lives that propel the early dialogue—how this becomes an energy that moves among the guests like a circulating angel, inspiring stories, rumors, flirtations and misconstrued remarks, basically the makings of human history, even

Decorative gestures add romance to a life.

We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now.

I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives. That is not my head on someone else's body in the photograph that's introduced as evidence. I didn't believe that nations play-act on a grand scale. I lived in the real.

There are no amateurs in the world of children.

The self. What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?

I feel artificially myself. I'm someone who's supposed to be me.

As though in her heart she was not a travel writer at all, as her mother had said she wished to be, but simply a traveler, in the purer form, someone who collects impressions, dense anatomies of feeling, but does not care to record them.