Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.

— Don DeLillo

Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me. I spent my life in small steamy delicatessens with slanted display cabinets full of trays that hold soft wet lumpy matter in pale colours. High enough cabinets so you had to stand on tiptoes to give your order. Shouts, accents. In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere. Men shout as they die to be noticed, remembered for a second or two. To die in an apartment instead of a house can depress the soul, I would imagine, for several lives to come. In a town there are houses, plants in bay windows. People notice dying better. The dead have faces, automobiles. If you don't know a name you know a street name, a dog's name. 'He drove an orange Mazda.' You know a couple of useless things about a person that become major facts of identification and cosmic placement when he dies suddenly, after a short illness, in his own bed, with a comforter and matching pillows, on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, feverish, a little congested in the sinuses and chest, thinking about his dry cleaning.

— Don DeLillo

I think fiction rescues history from its confusions.

— Don DeLillo

I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.

— Don DeLillo

I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become.

— Don DeLillo

I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read...I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

— Don DeLillo

Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S. Why not use it?

— Don DeLillo

The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now.

— Don DeLillo

I think what'll happen in the not-too-distant future is that we'll have humane wars. Each side agrees to use clean bombs. And each side agrees to limit the amount of megatons he uses. In other words, we'll get together with them beforehand and there'll be an agreement that if the issue can't be settled, whatever the issue might be, then let's make sure we keep our war as relatively clean as possible.

— Don DeLillo

Of course the humanistic mind crumbles at the whole idea. It's the most hideous thing in the world to these people that such ideas even have to be mentioned. But the thing won't go away. The thing is here and you have to face it. The prospect of a humane war may be hideous and all the other names you can think of, but it's still a prospect. And as an alternative to all the other things that could happen in the event of war, it's relatively acceptable.

— Don DeLillo

War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.

— Don DeLillo

I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing.

— Don DeLillo

I had centered myself, learning of the existence of an interior motion, a shift in the levels from isolation to solitude to wordlessness to immobility. When Opel occupied that center I became the thing that swirled.

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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.

— Don DeLillo

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.

— Don DeLillo

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

— Don DeLillo

Who will die first?

— Don DeLillo

I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread.

— Don DeLillo

All plots tend to move deathwards. This is the nature of plots.

— Don DeLillo

Every disaster made us wish for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.

— Don DeLillo

To become a crowd is to keep out death.

— Don DeLillo

I heard a noise, faint, monotonous, white.

— Don DeLillo

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.

— Don DeLillo

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

— Don DeLillo

I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.

— Don DeLillo

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

— Don DeLillo

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.

— Don DeLillo

It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.

— Don DeLillo

When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.

— Don DeLillo

Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.

— Don DeLillo

The future belongs to crowds

— Don DeLillo

When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear.

— Don DeLillo

There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.

— Don DeLillo

Remember literature, Charlie? It involved getting drunk and getting laid.

— Don DeLillo

Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.

— Don DeLillo

Terror makes the new future possible. All men one man, Men live in history as never before. He is saying we make an change history minute by minute. History is not the book or the human memory. We do history in the morning and change it after lunch.

— Don DeLillo

Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?'

— Don DeLillo

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.

— Don DeLillo

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

— Don DeLillo

The future belongs to crowds.

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

She wanted to create her future, not enter a state already shaped to her outline.

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.

— Don DeLillo