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Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?

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
Serious
Easy
Hard

More quotes by Don DeLillo

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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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The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.
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Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.
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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.
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Because friends have to be brutally honest with each other. I'd feel terrible if I didn't tell you what I was thinking, especially at a time like this
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Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.
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It is all falling indelibly into the past.
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holes are interesting. there are books about holes.
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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.
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Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.
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Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.
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The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
Don DeLillo
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I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore
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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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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.
Don DeLillo
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Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.
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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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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Facts are lonely things.
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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