Quotes from Don DeLillo

a closeness that felt sorry and cheap the minute she walked out of the room.

My life is either/or. Either I chew regular gum or I chew sugarless gum. Either I chew gum or I smoke. Either I smoke or I gain weight. Either I gain weight or I run up the stadium steps.' 'Sounds like a boring life.' 'I hope it lasts forever.

He found his cigar smoldering in an ashtray on the liquor cabinet and he fired it up again. The aroma gave him a sense of robust health. He smelled well-being, long life, even placid fatherhood, somewhere, in the burning leaf.

He tried to read his way into sleep but only grew more wakeful. He read science and poetry. He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper. Poems made him conscious of his breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice.

I am a bad actor. Not for me or my camera. I see the person, not some idea he wants to make himself into. I'm all idea today. I definitely don't see it. I'm playing the idea of death. Look closely, he said.

It seems that danger assigns to public voices the responsibility of a rhythm, as if in metrical units there is a coherence we can use to balance whatever senseless and furious event is about to come rushing around our heads.

Tyle w nich by?o chrze?cija?stwa. I tak niewiele z Chrystusa.

I'm not looking to wear the white man out with my ability to suffer.

I'm at that certain stage in a night of drinking and talking when I see things clearly through a small opening, a window in space.

It's how the news becomes so powerful it doesn't need TV or newspapers. It exists in people's perceptions. It's something they invent, strong enough to seem real. It's the news without the media.

But then it came time for me to make my journey—into America. [... N]o coincidence that my first novel is called Americana . That became my subject, the subject that shaped my work. When I get a French translation of one of my books that says 'translated from the American', I think, 'Yes, that's exactly right.

I wanted to free myself from that montage of speed, guns, torture, rape, orgy and consumer packaging which constitutes the vision of sex in America.

There's a neat correlation between the complexity of the hardware and the lack of genuine attachments. Devices make everyone pliant. There's a general sponginess, a lack of conviction.

We saw a cloudwall hung many miles to the east and hawks floating in the unforced motion that makes you think they've been up there, the same two birds since bible times.

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck. Things have no limits now. Money has no limits. I don't understand money anymore. Money is undone. Violence is undone, violence is easier now, it's uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values.

As pessoas nao vão morrer. Não é esse o credo da nova cultura? As pessoas vão ser absorvidas em fluxos de informações. Não entendo nada disso. Os computadores vão morrer. Já estão morrendo na sua forma atual. Estão praticamente mortos como unidades distintas. Uma caixa, uma tela, um teclado. Eles estão se dissolvendo na textura da vida cotidiana. (...) Até a palavra computador parece retrógrada e burra.

Isn't it possible that this midcentury moment enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping strategies of eminent leaders, generals steely in their sunglasses -- the mapped visions that pierce our dreams?

Let's enjoy these aimless days while we can, I told myself, fearing some kind of deft acceleration.

Baseball's oh so simple. You tag a man, he's out. How different from being it. What spectral genius in the term, that curious part of childhood that sees through the rhymes and nonsense words, past the hidings and seekings and pretendings to something old and dank, some medieval awe, he thought, or earlier, even, that crawls beneath the midnight skin.

He told me that I hadn't done anything yet. Hadn't lived yet. All you do is pass the time, he said.

He tried sedatives and hypnotics but they made him dependent, sending him inward in tight spirals. Every act he performed was self-haunted and synthetic. The palest thought carried an anxious shadow.

Either I'm taking something and I don't remember or I'm not taking something and I don't remember. My life is either/or. Either I chew regular gum or I chew sugarless gum. Either I chew gum or I smoke. Either I smoke or I gain weight. Either I gain weight or I run up the stadium steps." "Sounds like a boring life." "I hope it lasts forever," she said.

At first it was only a nuisance. Now it's a nuisance that threatens to become a way of life.