Quotes from Don DeLillo

There's a certain man, an archetype, he's a model of dependability for his male friends, all the things a friend should be, an ally and confidant, lends money, gives advice, loyal and so on, but sheer hell on women. Living breathing hell. The closer a woman gets, the clearer it becomes to him that she is not one of his male friends. And the more awful it becomes for her. This is Keith. This is the man you're going to marry.

Everyone wants to own the end of the world.

Everyone was a spook or dupe or asset, a double, courier, cutout or defector, or was related to one. We were all linked in a vast and rhythmic coincidence, a daisy chain of rumor, suspicion and secret wish.

What about the Americans?" "Eerie people. Genetically engineered to play squash and work weekends.

If your child thinks you're guilty of something, right or wrong, then you're guilty.

We watched him use his spoon to mold the mashed potatoes on his plate into the shape of a volcanic mountain. He poured gravy ever so carefully into the opening at the top. Then he set to work ridding his steak of fat, veins and other imperfections. It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are.

We create beautiful and lasting things, build vast civilizations." "Gorgeous evasions," he said. "Great escapes.

We can't do justice to our dreams, reworking them in memory. They seem borrowed, part of another life, ours only maybe and only in the farthest margins.

To have true socialism, he said, we first establish capitalism, totally and heartlessly, and then destroy it by degrees, bury it in the sea.

Have you ever seen so many people, she whispered, gathered in one place in order to be rich, powerful and disgusting together?

There is only one truth. Whoever controls your eyeballs runs the world.

Every lost moment is the life. It's unknowable, except to us, each of us inexpressibly...

It was not Death that stood before me but only Vernon Dickey, my father-in-law.

He writes about mud and death and he makes me hungry.

Murray says it is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.

By the time you listen to this, I'll no longer remember what I said. I'll be an old message by then, buried under many new messages. The machine makes everything a message, which narrows the range of discourse and destroys the poetry of nobody home. Home is a failed idea. People are no longer home or not home. They're either picking up or not picking up.

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

As I listened I thought a featureless baggy man was striking me in slow motion with a well-polished stone.

The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone's, into some other distance, out beyond the towers.

Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war

It is time to "perform," he thought. She would have to be "satisfied." He would have to "service" her. They would make efforts to "interact.

Minnesota is a human moment.

Solitude asks no pledges of anyone.