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

As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.

Don DeLillo

primitive scope technology

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

Don DeLillo

irony earth animal

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

Don DeLillo

europe book thinking

You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.

Don DeLillo

break-through habit break

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

Don DeLillo

fabric salvation seems

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.

Don DeLillo

memories life thinking

Pain is just another form of information.

Don DeLillo

information form pain

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

Don DeLillo

endless solitude way

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

Don DeLillo

self heart giving

And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

Don DeLillo

powerful morning trying

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 safe world

Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.

Don DeLillo

lightning pain reality

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

Don DeLillo

sometimes long moving

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

Don DeLillo

following-rules grooming believe

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.

Don DeLillo

important mind art

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

Don DeLillo

too-much names memories

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

Don DeLillo

true-life written life-is

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.

Don DeLillo

writing people thinking

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

Don DeLillo

identity hero writing

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

Don DeLillo

form writing thinking