Quote

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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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
Need
Loses
Needs
Feeling
Every
Asks
Something
Understanding
Bare
Things
Sense
Reveal
Feelings
Crucial
Others
Allows
Everything
Lose

More quotes by Don DeLillo

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I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.
Don DeLillo
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I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.
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The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.
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It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line.
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I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.
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Let's enjoy the aimless days while we still can.
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I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.
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It is all falling indelibly into the past.
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The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
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It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.
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the instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms
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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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I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.
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Technology and violence are interdependent.
Don DeLillo
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A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.
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Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
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When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.
Don DeLillo
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I'd like to lose interest in myself.
Don DeLillo
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A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.
Don DeLillo
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There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.
Don DeLillo