Don DeLillo Quotes About Literature
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.
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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.
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Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.
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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.
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People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.
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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.
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Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.
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America was and is the immigrant's dream.
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I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.
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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.
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There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.
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I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.
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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?
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The future belongs to crowds.
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It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.
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When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.
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The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
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People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.
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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.
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There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.
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I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.
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