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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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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
Stories
World
Consoling
Prizes
Consolation
Prize
Lived
Fiction

More quotes by Don DeLillo

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I think that the massive, overarching, interconnected systems of technology tend to make us a little insecure, somewhat pliable, and susceptible to half-beliefs.
Don DeLillo
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The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.
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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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)
Don DeLillo
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Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.
Don DeLillo
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My attitudes aren't directed toward characters at all. I don't feel sympathetic toward some characters, unsympathetic toward others. I don't love some characters, feel contempt for others. They have attitudes I don't.
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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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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Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.
Don DeLillo
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Explain me to myself, you’ll make me choke on my lunch. Feel sympathy for me, I’ll puke monkey blood on your understated shoes.
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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The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.
Don DeLillo
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I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.
Don DeLillo
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How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?
Don DeLillo
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In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.
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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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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There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or 'terror in a lonely place', the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind.
Don DeLillo
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The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.
Don DeLillo
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People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.
Don DeLillo