Quotes from Don DeLillo

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

The future belongs to crowds.

I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.

There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?

It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.

If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.

He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows.

That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.

Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.

When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

Talent is more erotic when it's wasted.

Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.

It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams. ? Don DeLillo, Americana (ACTES SUD; 0 edition, August 10, 1993)

Facts are lonely things

He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.

He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.

Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.