Quotes from Don DeLillo

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

I think my work is influenced by the fact that we're living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times.

People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.

The family was an art ... and the dinner table was the place it found expression.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.

Isn't death the boundary we need?

To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.

The dead have a presence.

I felt myself getting whiter... What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in?

If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.

What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

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

I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.

Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is, 'I know this feeling. I was here before.

Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?' What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing

Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.

I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.