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In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.

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
Means
Fond
Speak
Reserved
Felt
Amusement
Night
Rescue
Past
Irony
Mean
Sympathy
Things
Create
Time
Space
Recitation

More quotes by Don DeLillo

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I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.
Don DeLillo
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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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It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.
Don DeLillo
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I was never either pro-culture or counter-culture. I was in a kind of middle state.
Don DeLillo
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To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.
Don DeLillo
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What did it mean, the first time, a thinking creature looked deeply into another's eyes? Did it take a hundred thousand years before this happened or it was the first thing they did, transcendingly, the thing that made them higher, made them modern, the gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls?
Don DeLillo
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...Because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond necessity.
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
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All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.
Don DeLillo
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What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.
Don DeLillo
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Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.
Don DeLillo
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I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.
Don DeLillo
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There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.
Don DeLillo
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Explain me to myself, you’ll make me choke on my lunch. Feel sympathy for me, I’ll puke monkey blood on your understated shoes.
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
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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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The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?
Don DeLillo
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I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.
Don DeLillo
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People will always make comparisons.
Don DeLillo
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The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.
Don DeLillo