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I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.

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
Next
Honor
Acts
Writing
Spend
Reflection
Every
Worth
Findings
Things
Thousand
Finding
Life
Rest
Notes
Reflections
World
Stop
Ten
Recording
Space
Pages
Journal
Living
Bottom
Ashamed

More quotes by Don DeLillo

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Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?
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A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.
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Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now.
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Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.
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It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space.
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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.
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The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
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Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.
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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.
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Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination.
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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.
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May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.
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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.
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The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?
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Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.
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I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.
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America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.
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Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.
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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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Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.
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