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There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or 'terror in a lonely place', the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind.

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
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Originals
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Original
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Terror
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Mind
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It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.
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Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.
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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.
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Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.
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Freud is finished, Einstein's next.
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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.
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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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I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.
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It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space.
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Something lurked inside the truth.
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There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.
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Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.
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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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There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.
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People will always make comparisons.
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Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.
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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.
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The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
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...Because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond necessity.
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Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.
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