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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
In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary from book to book. But in many books, there is a colloquialism of address. The characters will speak in a quite idiosyncratic way sometimes.
Don DeLillo
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
You become a serious novelist by living long enough.
Don DeLillo
Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.
Don DeLillo
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.
Don DeLillo
Technology and violence are interdependent.
Don DeLillo
The family was an art ... and the dinner table was the place it found expression.
Don DeLillo
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
America was and is the immigrant's dream.
Don DeLillo
The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it.
Don DeLillo
I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.
Don DeLillo
Murray said, ´I don´t trust anybody´s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.´
Don DeLillo
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.
Don DeLillo
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
Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets.
Don DeLillo
I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.
Don DeLillo
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
My attitudes aren't directed toward characters at all. I don't feel sympathetic toward some characters, unsympathetic toward others. I don't love some characters, feel contempt for others. They have attitudes I don't.
Don DeLillo
Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S. Why not use it?
Don DeLillo
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
