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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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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
Things
Avoid
Subtlety
World
Took
Mockery
Says
Ambiguity
Natural
Pains
Pain
Vulnerability
History
Irony
Sense
Civilized
Depreciation
Self
Tragic
Weariness

More quotes by Don DeLillo

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I'd like to lose interest in myself.
Don DeLillo
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The world isn't going to be destroyed, but you don't feel safe anymore in your plane or train or office or auditorium.
Don DeLillo
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It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.
Don DeLillo
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Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.
Don DeLillo
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And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?
Don DeLillo
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Off-camera lives are unverifiable.
Don DeLillo
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Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be.
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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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
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Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera? Because our lives are a vivid situation.
Don DeLillo
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How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?
Don DeLillo
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People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.
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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Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.
Don DeLillo
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Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.
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
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It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.
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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I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.
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