Quote

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

Don DeLillo

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Form
Earth
Human
Irony
Humans
Highest
Must
Animal
Life
Dies
Experience
Sense

More quotes by Don DeLillo

Image
I never wanted to change the world. Norman Mailer wanted to, he set himself the task of changing the consciousness of our age. And I think he came pretty close, in the 1960s, to actually managing to do it. But me? No, no, I never wanted anything like that. I'm not Maileresque.
Don DeLillo
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 haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.
Don DeLillo
Image
I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.
Don DeLillo
Image
I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.
Don DeLillo
Image
Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.
Don DeLillo
Image
Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.
Don DeLillo
Image
A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.
Don DeLillo
Image
A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.
Don DeLillo
Image
There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or 'terror in a lonely place', the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind.
Don DeLillo
Image
When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.
Don DeLillo
Image
I've always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.
Don DeLillo
Image
If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
Don DeLillo
Image
The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.
Don DeLillo
Image
Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.
Don DeLillo
Image
I was never either pro-culture or counter-culture. I was in a kind of middle state.
Don DeLillo
Image
I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.
Don DeLillo
Image
The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.
Don DeLillo
Image
There are two categories of writers, it could be said: The author who is just a voice, and the one who is also creating a picture. I belong to the latter, because I have an acute visual sense.
Don DeLillo
Image
Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now.
Don DeLillo
Image
I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.
Don DeLillo