813 Quotes by Don DeLillo

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.

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.

I've always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire.

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

What terrorists gain, novelists lose.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

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