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I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.

Don DeLillo

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Don DeLillo
Age: 87
Born: 1936
Born: November 20
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Don Delillo
Donald Richard DeLillo
Whether
Death
Outlive
Inside
Question

More quotes by Don DeLillo

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Coming and going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never. And I have seen what I will see. If I am where I will be. Because nothing comes between me.
Don DeLillo
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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
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If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.
Don DeLillo
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I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.
Don DeLillo
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I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.
Don DeLillo
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It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.
Don DeLillo
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Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.
Don DeLillo
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A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require.
Don DeLillo
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The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.
Don DeLillo
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The dead have a presence.
Don DeLillo
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I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next.
Don DeLillo
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All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.
Don DeLillo
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To be a tourist is to escape accountability.
Don DeLillo
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Naturally a direct comparison of terrorist and novelist is complete nonsense. But there was once a time when the novelist also had some influence on how his contemporaries thought, the way they saw the world, the way they lived.
Don DeLillo
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In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary from book to book. But in many books, there is a colloquialism of address. The characters will speak in a quite idiosyncratic way sometimes.
Don DeLillo
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May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.
Don DeLillo
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I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let's not say men. Let's say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.
Don DeLillo
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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
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Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.
Don DeLillo
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America was and is the immigrant's dream.
Don DeLillo