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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: 87
Born: 1936
Born: November 20
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Don Delillo
Donald Richard DeLillo
Easy
Hard
Serious

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Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it.
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I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.
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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.
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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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... there was an honesty inherent in bulkiness if it is just the right amount.
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What terrorists gain, novelists lose.
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I was never either pro-culture or counter-culture. I was in a kind of middle state.
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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.
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Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.
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What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.
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Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
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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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Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.
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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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I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.
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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
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Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination.
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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.
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The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.
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Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.
Don DeLillo