813 Quotes by Don DeLillo

If your child thinks you’re guilty of something, right or wrong, then you’re guilty.

There were no laptops or handheld devices in class. Ilgauskas didn’t exclude them; we did, sort of, unspokenly. Some of us could barely complete a thought without touch pads or scroll buttons, but we understood that high-speed data systems did not belong here. They were an assault on the environment, which was defined by length, width, and depth, with time drawn out, computed in heartbeats.

Technology has become a force of nature. We can’t control it. It comes blowing over the planet and there’s nowhere for us to hide.

He had ambitions on my behalf and more or less at my expense. This is the custom among men who have failed to be heroes; their sons must prove that the seed was not impoverished.

I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

By the time you listen to this, I’ll no longer remember what I said. I’ll be an old message by then, buried under many new messages. The machine makes everything a message, which narrows the range of discourse and destroys the poetry of nobody home. Home is a failed idea. People are no longer home or not home. They’re either picking up or not picking up.

It’s true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.

There’s less and less for people to talk to when they talk to me. I hope diminishing existence isn’t contagious.

You understand it’s not a matter of strategy. I’m not talking about secrets or deceptions. I’m talking about being yourself. If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things the others don’t know. It’s what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.