The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now.
—Don DeLillo
If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
—Don DeLillo
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.
—Don DeLillo
Topics: Football
Don’t you realize that as long as you have to sit down to pee, you’ll never be a dominant force in the world? You’ll never be a convincing technocrat or middle manager. Because people will know. She’s in there sitting down.
—Don DeLillo
Topics: Women
Hardship makes the world obscure.
—Don DeLillo
Topics: Difficulties, Difficulty
Fame is the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic.
—Don DeLillo
In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It’s the drowning out of false voices.
—Don DeLillo
Topics: Madness
There’s always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.
—Don DeLillo
Topics: Weather, Rain, Water
I think it’s only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place. But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes.
—Don DeLillo
Topics: America
I’ve come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.
—Don DeLillo
Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.
—Don DeLillo
Topics: Secrets
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.
—Don DeLillo
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
- Joseph Heller American Novelist
- John Irving American Novelist
- John Barth American Novelist
- John Updike American Author
- Russell Hoban American Author
- Truman Capote American Novelist
- Sinclair Lewis American Novelist
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
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