Quotes from Don DeLillo

Combien de commencements avant de voir les mensonges dans son propre enthousiasme ?

From beyond the grave, dead living legend John Wayne will communicate telepathically with President Reagan to help frame U.S. foreign policy. Mellowed by death, the strapping actor will advocate a hopeful policy or peace and love.

Death adapts, like a viral agent. Is it a law of nature? Or some private superstition of mine?

Writing was bad for the soul when you got right down to it. It protected your worst tendencies. Narrowed everything to failure and its devastations. Gave your cunning an edge of treachery and your jellyfish heart a reason to fall deeper into silence.

This is the last avant-garde. Bold new forms. The power to shock.

This must be how people escape the pull of the earth, the gravitational leaf-flutter that brings us hourly closer to dying.

If the eye is a mystery, totally forget the ear. Just say 'cochlea' to somebody, they look at you like, 'Who's this guy?' There's this while world right inside our own body.

I got out of bed in the middle of the night and went to the small room at the end of the hall to watch Steffie and Wilder sleep. I remained at this task, motionless, for nearly an hour, feeling refreshed and expanded in unnameable ways.

words stick even as lives fly apart.

He was doing chinning exercies in the closet, using a bar clamped to the doorway. 'Where did you get that?' 'It's Mercator's.' 'Who's that?' 'He's this senior I hang around with now. He's almost nineteen and he's still in high school. To give you some idea.' 'Some idea of what?' 'How big he is. He bench-presses these awesome amounts.

I didn't call Marian. I felt a loneliness, for lack of a better word, but that's the word in fact, a thing I tried never to admit to and knew how to step outside of, but sometimes even this was not means enough, and I didn't call her because I would not give in, watching the night come down.

Once you're a made man, you don't need the constant living influence of sources outside yourself.

various heroic poses, gesture gracefully. She makes references to yoga, kendo, trance-walking. She talks of Sufi dervishes, Sherpa mountaineers. The old folks nod and listen. Nothing is foreign, nothing too remote to apply. I am always surprised at their acceptance and trust, the sweetness of their belief. Nothing is too doubtful to be of use to them as they seek to redeem their bodies from a lifetime of bad posture. It is the end of skepticism.

He immersed a piece of steak in the gravy that sat in the volcanic depression, then put it in his mouth. But he did not begin chewing until he'd scooped some potatoes from the lower slopes and added it to the meat. A tension seemed to be building around the question of whether he could finish the gravy before the potatoes collapsed.

The soft life is what I'm settling into and the only question is how deadly it will turn out to be.

I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

There are times when you want to stop working at faith and just be washed in a blowing wind that tells you everything.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.

You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.