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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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People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.
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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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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If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.
Don DeLillo
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Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.
Don DeLillo
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Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?' What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing
Don DeLillo
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Freud is finished, Einstein's next.
Don DeLillo
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Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.
Don DeLillo
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May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.
Don DeLillo
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Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.
Don DeLillo
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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.
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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The world is shrinking into a kind of technological funnel. I think people are drawn into their technological devices, and this becomes a kind of subjective universe, into which much of the rest of the world simply does not enter.
Don DeLillo
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I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.
Don DeLillo
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Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.
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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I would never write in response to what I believe the public wanted or needed.
Don DeLillo
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To be a tourist is to escape accountability.
Don DeLillo
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The term itself--my life--is a desperate overstatement.
Don DeLillo
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I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.
Don DeLillo