Quote

Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?' What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing

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
Doesn
Quivering
Thing
Anxious
Make
Precious
Good
Anxiety
Life
Based
Knowledge
Fear
Death
Preciousness

More quotes by Don DeLillo

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I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.
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.
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Pain is just another form of information.
Don DeLillo
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Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets.
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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Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.
Don DeLillo
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Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.
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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I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.
Don DeLillo
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Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.
Don DeLillo
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First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there's a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger.
Don DeLillo
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The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.
Don DeLillo
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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 at that time, but very infrequently. 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
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Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.
Don DeLillo
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I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.
Don DeLillo
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What terrorists gain, novelists lose.
Don DeLillo
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A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn't live his life in a certain way, this death is an introduction to an eternity of pain.
Don DeLillo
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Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.
Don DeLillo
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Technology is lust removed from nature.
Don DeLillo
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That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.
Don DeLillo