Quotes from Don DeLillo

There's less and less for people to talk to when they talk to me. I hope diminishing existence isn't contagious.

I would think of it with affection because of its scenes of fragmentary beauty, because it brought men closer together through their perversity and fear, because it enabled us to pretend that death could be a tender experience, and because it breached the long silence.

What if death is nothing but sound?" "Electrical noise." "You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful." "Uniform, white." -Jack Gladney

When we reached the sidewalk, a lovely teen-age girl wearing pink eyelashes asked me for my autograph. I don't know who you are, she said, but I'm sure you must be somebody.

Branch is stuck all right. He has abandoned his life to understanding that moment in Dallas, the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century. [...] There is also the Warren Report, of course, with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words. Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.

The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.

He had a good vocabulary except when he was talking to someone.

I maintain myself on the puppet drug of personal technology. Every touch of a button brings the neural rush of finding something I never knew and never needed to know until it appears at my anxious fingertips, where it remains for a shaky second before disappearing forever. My

This country is toilet-oriented.

In a country that's in a hurry to make the future, the names attached to the products are an enduring reassurance.

The pattern match begins with a search for a substring of a given string that has a specified structure in the string manipulation language

I'd been doing this for a while, attempting to define a word for an object or even a concept. Define loyalty, define truth. I had to stop before it killed me. The

A writer creates a character as a way to reveal consciousness, increase the flow of meaning. This is how we reply to power and beat back our fear.

I like old movies on television where a man lights a woman's cigarette. That's all they seemed to do in those old movies, the men and women. I'm normally so totally disregardless. But every time I see an old movie on television, I keep a sharp eye out for a man lighting a woman's cigarette.

The dead have come to take the living. The dead in winding-sheets, the regimented dead on horseback, the skeleton that plays the hurdy-gurdy.

I was living, in short, on the edge of a landscape of vast shame.

In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are. No one's knowledge is less secure than your own.

Men in small rooms, in isolation. A cell is the basic state. They put you in a room and lock the door. So simple it's a form of genius. This is the final size of all the forces around you. Eight by fifteen.

I could feel myself lapsing into my smallest self, all the vainglorious ideas around me shrunk into personal reverie because what am I in this place but someone in need of self-defense. •

We have learned not to be afraid of the dark but we've forgotten that darkness means death.

The dangerous secrets used to be held outside the government. Plots, conspiracies, secrets of revolution, secrets of the end of the social order. Now it's the government that has a lock on the secrets that matter. All the danger is in the White House, from nuclear weapons on down.

A Greek will never say anything he hasn't already said a thousand times." Her husband Charles reprimanded me for not knowing the word. To Charles it was a mark of one's respect for other cultures to know the local terms of abuse and the words for sex acts and natural wastes.

It's the novelist who understand the secret life, the rage that underlies all obscurity and neglect. You're half murderers, most of you.

It is just so interesting, he says at last. The colors and all. The colors and all.