In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending. — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
“He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.” — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
“This sentiment was expressed not so much in words and actions as in terrible and articulate sounds” — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
When I work I have a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words I'm making. I use a machine with larger… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping. — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
There's something nearly mystical about certain words and phrases that float through our lives. It's computer mysticism. Words that are computer generated… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world.… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“Even as he printed the words, he imagined people reading them, people moved by his loneliness and disappointment, even by his wretched… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
“The only private language I know is self-exaggeration. I think I've grown a second self in this room. It's the self-important fool… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
“Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
I think it's only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
We feel certain that the extraterrestrial message is a mathematical code of some kind. Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending. So… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
“We all know how the thing we secretly fear is not a secret at all but the open and eternal thing that predicts its… — Don DeLillo Copy Share
The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements. — Don DeLillo Copy Share
“As I listened I thought a featureless baggy man was striking me in slow motion with a well-polished stone.” — Don DeLillo Copy Share
“Murray said, 'I don't trust anybody's nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between… — Don DeLillo Copy Share
“She is beginning to think it is possible that all creation is a spurt of blank matter that chances to make an emerald planet… — Don DeLillo Copy Share
“Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief… — Don DeLillo Copy Share
“The plane had lost power in all three engines, dropped from thirty-four thousand feet to twelve thousand feet. Something like four miles. When the… — Don DeLillo Copy Share
“Grass: I live in a great steel tower that reflects the blazing sun. People catch fire just walking by. The more bodies that pile… — Don DeLillo Copy Share
“Marriage is something we make from available materials. In this sense it’s improvised, it’s almost offhand. Maybe this is why we know so little… — Don DeLillo Copy Share
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,… — Don DeLillo Copy Share
I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version. — Don DeLillo Copy Share
There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a… — Don DeLillo Copy Share
