813 Quotes by Don DeLillo

Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.

Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.

Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.

America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.

Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.

The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

the instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms

My attitudes aren't directed toward characters at all. I don't feel sympathetic toward some characters, unsympathetic toward others. I don't love some characters, feel contempt for others. They have attitudes; I don't.

If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.