Quotes from Don DeLillo

Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.

The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe. As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe... Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.

It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.

A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.

Murray said, 'I don't trust anybody's nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.

I don't want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.

These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.

Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets.

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.

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

Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.

When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.

Longing on a large scale makes history.

This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. - Murray (WN 285)

Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.

May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.

Let's enjoy the aimless days while we still can.

When he died he would not end. The world would end.

The more things I threw away, the more I found.

The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong. (Point Omega)