Quotes from Don DeLillo

Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.

Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.

Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.

Famous people don't want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there's something crawling in their clothes.

The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there,' she said. 'This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.

Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.

War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.

Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.

I like simple men and complicated women.

It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture.

Hardship makes the world obscure.

When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.

When I work I have a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words I'm making. I use a machine with larger than average letters: the bigger the better.

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.

Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.

It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at.

I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.