Don DeLillo Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

  Don DeLillo

  Book, Thinking, Europe

  1982 Owen Brademas. The Names, ch.1.

• It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

  Don DeLillo

  Book, Writing, Three

  "Don DeLillo: 'I'm not trying to manipulate reality - this is what I see and hear'" by Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. August 7, 2010.

• holes are interesting. there are books about holes.

  Don DeLillo

  Book, Interesting, Holes

  Don DeLillo (2011). “Cosmopolis”, p.152, Pan Macmillan

• For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

  Don DeLillo

  Religious, Book, Writing

• A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.

  Don DeLillo

  Real, Book, Wind

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.103, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

  Don DeLillo

  Integrity, Book, Men

• In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending. So for much of the period in which I'm writing, I'm waiting to understand what's going to happen next, and how and where it's going to happen. In some cases, fairly early in the process, I do know how a book will end. But most of the time, not at all, and in this particular case, many questions are still unanswered, even though I've been working for months.

  Don DeLillo

  Book, Writing, Waiting

  "Living in dangerous times". Interview with Kevin Nance, articles.chicagotribune.com. October 12, 2012.

• The language of my books has shaped me as a man.

  Don DeLillo

  Book, Men, Language

  Don DeLillo (1992). “Mao II: A Novel”, p.48, Penguin

• We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

  Don DeLillo

  Book, Media, Age

  "I don't know America anymore". Interview with Christoph Amend, Georg Diez, perival.com. October 11, 2007.

• In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary
  from book to book. But in many books, there is a colloquialism of address. The characters will speak in a quite idiosyncratic way sometimes.

  Don DeLillo

  Book, Writing, Character

  Interview with Martha Lavey, www.steppenwolf.org.

• The difference between the world of pictures and the world of printed matter is extraordinary and hard to define. A picture is like the masses: a multitude of impressions. A book on the other hand, with its linear advance of words and characters seems to be connected to individual identity.

  Don DeLillo

  Book, Character, Hands

  "Masses, Power and the Elegance of Sentences". Interview with Brigitte Desalm, perival.com. October 27, 1992.

• Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals.

  Don DeLillo

  Book, People, Individual

  "Masses, Power and the Elegance of Sentences". Interview with Brigitte Desalm, October 27, 1992.

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