Quotes from Don DeLillo

The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error.

It doesn't cause nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath, like they said before." "What does it cause?" "Heart palpitations and a sense of déjà vu." "Déjà vu?" "It affects the false part of the human memory or whatever. That's not all. They're not calling it the black billowing cloud anymore." "What are they calling it?" He looked at me carefully. "The airborne toxic event.

There was an aluminum awning over the office door. On the door itself were little plastic letters arranged in slots to spell out a message. The message was: NU MISH BOOT ZUP KO. Gibberish but high-quality gibberish.

He spent half his life looking for bottle openers in other peoples' kitchens.

How much myth do we build into our experience of time?

Et puis aussi, c'était New York, où les gens ne posent pas de questions.

This was the key it seemed to us. Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.

He lost the paradoxical gift for being separate and alone and yet intimately connected, mind-wired to distant things.

No caffeine always helps". Yes, I thought. Reward my virtue, give me life.

How deep is time? How far down into the life of matter do we have to go before we understand what time is?

We are the sum total of our data, I told her, just as we are the sum total of our chemical impulses. I

hair. "The flow is constant," Alfonse said. "Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them.

being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we're writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we're bad citizens, we're doing our job.

They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.

Were we a fragile unit surrounded by hostile facts? Would I promote ignorance, prejudice and superstition to protect my family from the world?

But there are different kinds of death, David. And I prefer that kind, his kind, to the death I've been fighting all my life.

You forgot] the importance of the lopsided, the thing that's skewed a little. You were looking for balance, beautiful balance, equal parts, equal sides. I know this. I know you. But you should have been tracking the yen in its tics and quirks. The little quirk. The misshape...That's where the answer was, in your body, in your prostate.

All that winter I shoveled snow and read books. The lines of print, the alphabetic characters, the strokes of the shovel when I cleared a walk, the linear arrangement of words on a page, the shovel strokes, the rote exercises in school texts, the novels I read, the dictionaries I found in the tiny library, the nature and shape of books, the routine of shovel strokes in the deep snow - this was how I began to build an individual.

Muitas vezes, a coisa que relutamos em tocar parece ser nossa própria salvação.

Whoever controls your eyeballs runs the world.

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.

I wanted to become an artist, as I believed them to be, an individual willing to deal in the complexities of truth. I was most successful. I ended in silence, in darkness, sitting still, a maker of objects that imitate my predilection.

Devices make us pliant. We want to please them.

Speed is the last excitement left, the one thing we haven't used up, still naked in its potential, the mysterious black gift that thrills the millions.