Latest Don DeLillo Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Thinking, Language

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

• One of my earliest memories as a reader - I don't know how old I was, quite young - was a poem of his, called "Fog," and I remember the first verse, "The fog comes / on little cat feet".

  Don DeLillo

  Memories, Cat, Remember

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

• 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 writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.

  Don DeLillo

  Dying, Want, Might

  "Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists". Book by Tom LeClair, Larry McCaffery, perival.com. 1979.

• 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.

  Don DeLillo

  Attitude, Character, Sympathetic

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.6, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

  Don DeLillo

  Age, Difficult, Reader

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.12, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• Perhaps we've invented conspiracies for our own psychic well-being, to heal ourselves.

  Don DeLillo

  Psychics, Conspiracy, Well Being

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.51, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.

  Don DeLillo

  Real, Thinking, Confusion

  "DeLillo's Novel Look at Oswald: Rescuing History From Confusion". Interview with Elizabeth Mehren, perival.com. August 12, 1988.

• That's how you write novels actually. You suddenly hit upon something and you realize this is the path you were meant to take. You'd be a fool if you didn't follow it. Perhaps it's like solving a difficult question in pure mathematics. There must be a moment when the solution is so simple and evident that you wonder why you hadn't come upon it before. When you do come upon it, you know it in the deepest part of your being. It carries its own logic.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Simple, Difficult Questions

  "The Day John Kennedy Died". Interview with Jonh Wilde, perival.com. November 19, 1988.

• I don't consider myself paranoid at all. I think I see things exactly as they are.

  Don DeLillo

  Thinking, Paranoid

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.37, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• It's impossible to write about the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath without taking note of twenty-five years of paranoia which has collected around that event.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Years, Twenties

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.38, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• 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.

• Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror. Today, the men who shape and inflence human consciousness are the terrorists.

  Don DeLillo

  Believe, Men, Long Ago

  "I Take the Language Apart". Interview with Nora Kerr, perival.com. June 9, 1991.

• There are two categories of writers, it could be said: The author who is just a voice, and the one who is also creating a picture. I belong to the latter, because I have an acute visual sense.

  Don DeLillo

  Two, Voice, Creating

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

• 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.

• 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.

  Don DeLillo

  Average, Machines, Use

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.117, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• There's something nearly mystical about certain words and phrases that float through our lives. It's computer mysticism. Words that are computer generated to be used on products that might be sold anywhere from Japan to Denmark - words devised to be pronounceable in a hundred languages. And when you detach one of these words from the product it was designed to serve, the words acquires a chantlike quality.

  Don DeLillo

  Japan, Quality, Phrases

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.97, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• Technology and violence are interdependent.

  Don DeLillo

  Technology, Violence

  Interview with Cecilia Sjoholm, perival.com. 1994.

• If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.

  Don DeLillo

  Art, Challenges, Novelists

  "Don DeLillo's Hidden Truths". Interview with David Streitfield, perival.com. November 11, 1997.

• The world isn't going to be destroyed, but you don't feel safe anymore in your plane or train or office or auditorium.

  Don DeLillo

  Office, World, Safe

  "Acclaimed writer DeLillo gives rare reading in McCosh 50". The Daily Princetonian Interview,

• The excitement of theatre is palpable but the frustrations, and the complete absence of a definitive evening - the play as text means practically nothing in a way - , there's no particular performance that is definitive in the way a novel is a solid object you hold in your hands and here it is. You can't say that about a play. If the novel gives us a sense of throbbing consciousness, theater is pure soul, beautiful and elusive.

  Don DeLillo

  Beautiful, Mean, Frustration

  Interview with Marc Chénetier, François Happe, perival.com. March 11, 1999.

• That's what in theory differentiates a writer from everyone else. You see and hear more clearly.

  Don DeLillo

  Theory, Differentiate

  "Lurking around society's edges". The Age Interview, www.theage.com.au. February 22, 2006.

• Terror is now the world narrative, unquestionably. When those two buildings were struck, and when they collapsed, it was, in effect, an extraordinary blow to consciousness, and it changed everything.

  Don DeLillo

  Blow, Two, World

  "Finding reason in an age of terror". Interview with David L. Ulin, articles.latimes.com. April 15, 2003.

• A writer decides to follow some ideas and not others for reasons that aren't always clear to him. It's often a matter of intuition.

  Don DeLillo

  Ideas, Intuition, Matter

  "Unraveling DeLillo". Interview with Sid Smith, articles.chicagotribune.com. April 30, 2006.

• If an idea seems to find its way towards a stage setting, that's the direction I take. I don't know if I'm trying to achieve anything other than to follow an idea on to the page.

  Don DeLillo

  Ideas, Trying, Pages

  "The accidental playwright". Interview with Dominic Maxwell, perival.com. April 24, 2006.