American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous. — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
I would never write in response to what I believe the public wanted or needed. — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world. — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see. — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it. — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence. — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
A writer decides to follow some ideas and not others for reasons that aren't always clear to him. It's often a matter… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices. — 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. — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism. — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery,… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
“Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary from book to book. But in many… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers… — Don Delillo Copy Share Image
There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter… — 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
In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he… — 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
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
“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 Copy Share Image
It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation… — 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
“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 don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. — 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
When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery. — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
That's what in theory differentiates a writer from everyone else. You see and hear more clearly. — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
It's impossible to write about the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath without taking note of twenty-five years of paranoia which has collected… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore. — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
Writers, some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren't noticed in… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers.… — 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
