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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
Moments
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Terror
Every
Anxiety
Semantic
Mind
Lonely
Prolonged
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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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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.
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Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.
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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.
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Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.
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All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.
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I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore
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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.
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The term itself--my life--is a desperate overstatement.
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Off-camera lives are unverifiable.
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Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.
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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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Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be.
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holes are interesting. there are books about holes.
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He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.
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You become a serious novelist by living long enough.
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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.
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Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.
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Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.
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