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The term itself--my life--is a desperate overstatement.

Don DeLillo

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Don DeLillo
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: November 20
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Don Delillo
Donald Richard DeLillo
Overstatement
Desperate
Term
Life

More quotes by Don DeLillo

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In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere.
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How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?
Don DeLillo
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Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.
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I think fiction recues history from its confusions.
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Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S. Why not use it?
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Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.
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Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.
Don DeLillo
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To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.
Don DeLillo
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Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.
Don DeLillo
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Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
Don DeLillo
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Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.
Don DeLillo
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He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.
Don DeLillo
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You gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.
Don DeLillo
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I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.
Don DeLillo
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Facts are lonely things.
Don DeLillo
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Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.
Don DeLillo
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Hardship makes the world obscure.
Don DeLillo
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It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space.
Don DeLillo
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If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.
Don DeLillo
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In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.
Don DeLillo