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Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.

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
Absorb
Terror
Point
Stories

More quotes by Don DeLillo

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American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.
Don DeLillo
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I marched and I protested against the war in Vietnam, along with many, many thousands of others. But I never quite understood the bombs that were placed in science labs or office buildings.
Don DeLillo
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Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals.
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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She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn't working.
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America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.
Don DeLillo
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Sex finds us. Sex sees through us. That's why it's so shattering. It strips us of appearances.
Don DeLillo
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If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.
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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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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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?
Don DeLillo
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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.
Don DeLillo
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It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line.
Don DeLillo
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We need time to lose interest in things.
Don DeLillo
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All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.
Don DeLillo
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There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.
Don DeLillo
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Words are not necessary to one's experience of the true life.
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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I've always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.
Don DeLillo
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A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.
Don DeLillo