Quotes from Don DeLillo

There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or 'terror in a lonely place', the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind.

We need time to lose interest in things.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

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? (155)

There's never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President.

Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.

You gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.

Digital clocks took the 'space' out of time.

Because friends have to be brutally honest with each other. I'd feel terrible if I didn't tell you what I was thinking, especially at a time like this

Time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find... The future becomes insistent.

There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.

Everything I've stated may prove to be total poppycock.... Perhaps time will tell. Perhaps time will do nothing of the kind.

Rushdie is a hostage.

Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.

America was and is the immigrant's dream.

In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.

American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I'm not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.

Something lurked inside the truth.