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.
Every disaster made us wish for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.
Evil is movement towards void.
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.
War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.
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.
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.
I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.
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'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.
"Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror."
Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S. Why not use it?
To become a crowd is to keep out death.
I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread.
When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear.
"Remember literature, Charlie? It involved getting drunk and getting laid."
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.
I heard a noise, faint, monotonous, white.
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.
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.