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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.

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
Life
Inner
Possible
Taken
Gunmen
Culture
Alter
Artist
Bomb
Used
Makers
Think
Bombs
Thinking
Territory

More quotes by Don DeLillo

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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
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People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.
Don DeLillo
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The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.
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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It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.
Don DeLillo
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A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.
Don DeLillo
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Let's enjoy the aimless days while we still can.
Don DeLillo
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Writers, some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren't noticed in the way that a writer might notice.
Don DeLillo
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I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.
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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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
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I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.
Don DeLillo
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I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.
Don DeLillo
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Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.
Don DeLillo
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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.
Don DeLillo
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Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.
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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To be a tourist is to escape accountability.
Don DeLillo
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I'd like to lose interest in myself.
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