813 Quotes by Don DeLillo

When I work I have a sculptor’s sense of the shape of the words I’m making. I use a machine with larger than average letters: the bigger the better.

The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It’s a moment never to be thought of except when it’s in the process of unfolding. Maybe this is why it doesn’t seem peculiar. It is only me. I don’t think about it. I simply live within it and then leave it behind.

She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn’t working.

And what’s the point of waking up in the morning if you don’t try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child’s mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.

There’s the life and there’s the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie? Everything seeks its own heightened version.

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.

World is supposed to mean something that’s self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.

We create beautiful and lasting things, build vast civilizations.” “Gorgeous evasions,” he said. “Great escapes.