A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require. Don DeLillo More Quotes by Don DeLillo More Quotes From Don DeLillo To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Don DeLillo accountabilitytourists There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past. Don DeLillo fadingtalkingpast 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 religiouswritingbook 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 languagewritingthinking 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. Don DeLillo tricksenoughlong I never wanted to change the world. Norman Mailer wanted to, he set himself the task of changing the consciousness of our age. And I think he came pretty close, in the 1960s, to actually managing to do it. But me? No, no, I never wanted anything like that. I'm not Maileresque. Don DeLillo changing-the-worldwantedworld 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 frustrationbeautifulmean Naturally a direct comparison of terrorist and novelist is complete nonsense. But there was once a time when the novelist also had some influence on how his contemporaries thought, the way they saw the world, the way they lived. Don DeLillo novelistswayworld I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world. Don DeLillo literatureworldthinking In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary Don DeLillo writingcharacterbook 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 blowtwoworld 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 novelistschallengesart Technology and violence are interdependent. Don DeLillo technologyviolence 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 japanphrasesquality To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish. Don DeLillo footballpastthinking I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see. Don DeLillo writinglooksneeds I think my work is influenced by the fact that we're living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times. Don DeLillo dangerousfactsthinking 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 twentieswritingyears 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 difficult-questionssimplewriting Perhaps we've invented conspiracies for our own psychic well-being, to heal ourselves. Don DeLillo well-beingpsychicsconspiracy
