Don DeLillo Quotes

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Don DeLillo

Profession : Novelist

Birth : November 20, 1936

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

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

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

I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it.

Don DeLillo

I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?

Don DeLillo

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

Don DeLillo

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

Don DeLillo

I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.

Don DeLillo

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

In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.

Don DeLillo

It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture.

Don DeLillo

People will always make comparisons.

Don DeLillo

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

Don DeLillo

The language of my books has shaped me as a man.

Don DeLillo

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.

Don DeLillo

There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.

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

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

Don DeLillo

When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.

Don DeLillo

Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

Don DeLillo