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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: 88
Born: 1936
Born: November 20
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Don Delillo
Donald Richard DeLillo
Outlive
Inside
Question
Whether
Death

More quotes by Don DeLillo

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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
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I felt myself getting whiter... What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in?
Don DeLillo
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I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.
Don DeLillo
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To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity.
Don DeLillo
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The difference between the world of pictures and the world of printed matter is extraordinary and hard to define. A picture is like the masses: a multitude of impressions. A book on the other hand, with its linear advance of words and characters seems to be connected to individual identity.
Don DeLillo
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The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
Don DeLillo
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Off-camera lives are unverifiable.
Don DeLillo
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Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.
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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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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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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...Because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond necessity.
Don DeLillo
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To be a tourist is to escape accountability.
Don DeLillo
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I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.
Don DeLillo
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The family was an art ... and the dinner table was the place it found expression.
Don DeLillo
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Technology is lust removed from nature.
Don DeLillo
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Facts are lonely things.
Don DeLillo
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The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.
Don DeLillo
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If an idea seems to find its way towards a stage setting, that's the direction I take. I don't know if I'm trying to achieve anything other than to follow an idea on to the page.
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