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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: 88
Born: 1936
Born: November 20
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Don Delillo
Donald Richard DeLillo
Pain
Vulnerability
History
Irony
Sense
Civilized
Depreciation
Self
Tragic
Weariness
Things
Avoid
Subtlety
World
Took
Mockery
Says
Ambiguity
Natural
Pains

More quotes by Don DeLillo

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The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it.
Don DeLillo
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There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist? (155)
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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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The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
Don DeLillo
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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
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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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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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It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.
Don DeLillo
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Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals.
Don DeLillo
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Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into the night, if you stand a while and look.
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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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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Words are not necessary to one's experience of the true life.
Don DeLillo
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Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.
Don DeLillo
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the instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms
Don DeLillo
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Freud is finished, Einstein's next.
Don DeLillo
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In the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape.
Don DeLillo
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I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfilment in America.
Don DeLillo
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There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.
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