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In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.

Don DeLillo
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Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.
Don DeLillo
For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
Don DeLillo
I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.
Don DeLillo
I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.
Don DeLillo
The language of my books has shaped me as a man.
Don DeLillo
I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?
Don DeLillo
One 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.
Don DeLillo
I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.
Don DeLillo
True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.
Don DeLillo
When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.
Don DeLillo
I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it.
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
People will always make comparisons.
Don DeLillo
I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.
Don DeLillo
The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?
Don DeLillo
I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.
Don DeLillo
I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.
Don DeLillo
In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.
Don DeLillo
In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.
Don DeLillo
A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn't live his life in a certain way, this death is an introduction to an eternity of pain.
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
Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.
Don DeLillo
May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.
Don DeLillo
There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.
Don DeLillo
I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.
Don DeLillo
Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.
Don DeLillo
American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.
Don DeLillo
Rushdie is a hostage.
Don DeLillo
People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.
Don DeLillo
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
I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.
Don DeLillo
America was and is the immigrant's dream.
Don DeLillo
Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
Don DeLillo
I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.
Don DeLillo
Hardship makes the world obscure.
Don DeLillo
The future belongs to crowds.
Don DeLillo
It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture.
Don DeLillo
The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
Don DeLillo
I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.
Don DeLillo
It occured to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.
Don DeLillo
People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.
Don DeLillo
There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.
Don DeLillo
Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.
Don DeLillo
I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.
Don DeLillo
The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.
Don DeLillo
Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash being brilliant.
Don DeLillo
California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life style. This alone warrants their doom.
Don DeLillo
Digital clocks took the space out of time.
Don DeLillo