Don DeLillo
Award-winning American author, playwright, and essayist, best known for his novels, which paint detailed portraits of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread.
I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing.
"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."
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.
All plots tend to move deathwards. This is the nature of plots.
I think fiction recues history from its confusions.
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.
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 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.
I heard a noise, faint, monotonous, white.
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.
"Remember literature, Charlie? It involved getting drunk and getting laid."
When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear.
Every disaster made us wish for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.
To become a crowd is to keep out death.
Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S. Why not use it?
"Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror."
I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.
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.
I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.