Quotes from Don DeLillo

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

Longing on a large scale is what makes history.

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.

Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.

In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

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

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.

There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.

Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

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.

I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.

I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.

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 a daring beyond our reach.

In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.

America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.

Don't you realize that as long as you have to sit down to pee, you'll never be a dominant force in the world? You'll never be a convincing technocrat or middle manager. Because people will know. She's in there sitting down.

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.

Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.

People stress the violence. That's the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there's a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There's a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there's a satisfaction to the game that can't be duplicated. There's a harmony.

The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now.

Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.

How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature.