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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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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
Happy
Less
Important
Smile
Expect
Office

More quotes by Don DeLillo

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The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you've killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it's ordinary murder.
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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The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.
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 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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Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera? Because our lives are a vivid situation.
Don DeLillo
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Time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find... The future becomes insistent.
Don DeLillo
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There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.
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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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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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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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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You gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.
Don DeLillo
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Isn't death the boundary we need?
Don DeLillo
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I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.
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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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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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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Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination.
Don DeLillo
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It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.
Don DeLillo