Writing Quotes by Don DeLillo

“Writing is freedom.”

— Don Delillo

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

— Don DeLillo

You become a serious novelist by living long enough.

— Don DeLillo

I would never write in response to what I believe the public wanted or needed.

— Don DeLillo

American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.

— Don DeLillo

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

— 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

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

To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.

— Don DeLillo

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.

— Don DeLillo

He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.

— Don DeLillo

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

I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and…

— Don DeLillo

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

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're…

— Don DeLillo

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

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living…

— Don DeLillo

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

“Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.…

— Don DeLillo

“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

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

“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

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

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

“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

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

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

It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.'

— Don DeLillo

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

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

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

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

— Don DeLillo

I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

— Don DeLillo

Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

— Don DeLillo

“Only writing could soak up his loneliness and pain. Written words could tell him who he was.”

— Don DeLillo