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 More Quotes by Don DeLillo More Quotes From Don DeLillo Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping. Don DeLillo amenities language past 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 machines use average He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him. Don DeLillo pain self world At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her. Don DeLillo stars sky night Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals. Don DeLillo individual book people 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 creating voice two I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. Don DeLillo ashamed next Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday. Don DeLillo ashes dying death We feel certain that the extraterrestrial message is a mathematical code of some kind. Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality. Don DeLillo independent intelligent reality Coming and going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never. And I have seen what I will see. If I am where I will be. Because nothing comes between me. Don DeLillo left leaving ifs There is a balance, a kind of standoff between the time continuum and the human entity, our frail bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it's true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second.... We were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time. Don DeLillo daughter time son I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change. Don DeLillo one-day There is a world inside the world. Don DeLillo world It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there. Don DeLillo homesick Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it. Don DeLillo scandal dying I think fiction recues history from its confusions. Don DeLillo confusion fiction thinking You feel sorry for yourself. You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is. You're lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash. Don DeLillo lonely jobs death I think silence is the condition you accept as the judgment on your crimes. Don DeLillo judgment silence thinking Hardship makes the world obscure. Don DeLillo obscure hardship world 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 pain running football
