Books Quotes by Don DeLillo

I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.

— Don DeLillo

The language of my books has shaped me as a man.

— Don DeLillo

“Remember literature, Charlie? It involved getting drunk and getting laid.”

— Don DeLillo

Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals.

— Don DeLillo

holes are interesting. there are books about holes.

— Don DeLillo

“I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

“The novel is a fucking killer. I try to show it every respect.”

— Don DeLillo

Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile…

— Don DeLillo

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

— Don DeLillo

A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.

— Don DeLillo

There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there…

— Don DeLillo

One of my earliest memories as a reader - I don't know how old I was, quite young - was a poem…

— Don DeLillo

When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don't have an audience;…

— Don DeLillo

A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it…

— Don DeLillo

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

— Don DeLillo

“But then it came time for me to make my journey—into America. [... N]o coincidence that my first novel is called Americana…

— Don DeLillo

“I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes…

— Don DeLillo

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is…

— Don DeLillo

If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe…

— Don DeLillo

There are two categories of writers, it could be said: The author who is just a voice, and the one who is…

— Don DeLillo

“There's the life and there's the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print…

— Don DeLillo

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation…

— Don DeLillo

For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of…

— Don DeLillo

“When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience;…

— Don DeLillo

“The novel used to feed our search for meaning. Quoting Bill. It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language,…

— Don DeLillo

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending. So…

— Don DeLillo

“There's the life and there's the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print…

— Don DeLillo

“It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience...For that reason, reading a novel is potentially…

— Don DeLillo

“When I think of highly plotted novels I think of detective fiction or mystery fiction, the kind of work that always produces…

— Don DeLillo

“Within sixty-minute limits or one-hundred-yard limits or the limits of a game board, we can look for perfect moments or perfect structures.…

— Don DeLillo

“One must become a book before one can know what is inside it.”

— 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…

— Don DeLillo

I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.

— Don DeLillo

“Brita said, 'I read at home, I read in hotels, I take a book with me on a twenty-minute trip to the…

— Don DeLillo

“How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You…

— Don DeLillo

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It…

— Don DeLillo

The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements.

— Don DeLillo

It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three…

— Don DeLillo

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins,…

— Don DeLillo