Don DeLillo Quotes

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.
Don DeLillo

Power, Violence, Open

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?
Don DeLillo

Life, End, Value

People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.
Don DeLillo

Power, Secret, Furthering

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

Power, State, Act

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.
Don DeLillo

Nature, Time, Fear

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

Work, Through, Word

Hardship makes the world obscure.
Don DeLillo

Makes, Hardship, Obscure

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.
Don DeLillo

Mean, Sound, Sentences

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

Work, Job, Write

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

Study, Four, Arts

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

Book, America, Europe

It occured to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.
Don DeLillo

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

Live, Moral, Writer

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.
Don DeLillo

Men, Secrets, Company

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

Work, Enjoy, Lovely

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.
Don DeLillo

Society, May, Act

America was and is the immigrant's dream.
Don DeLillo

America, Dream, Immigrant

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

Live, American, Dangerous

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

Alone, Concept, Doom

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

Truth, Waiting, End

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
Don DeLillo

Writing, Thinking

I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.
Don DeLillo

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.
Don DeLillo

Beauty, Language, Influence

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

Movies, Jazz, Writers

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

Work, Sense, Last

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Biography

Nationality: American

Born: November 20, 1936

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