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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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Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals.
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She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn't working.
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Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.
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We need time to lose interest in things.
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I never wanted to change the world. Norman Mailer wanted to, he set himself the task of changing the consciousness of our age. And I think he came pretty close, in the 1960s, to actually managing to do it. But me? No, no, I never wanted anything like that. I'm not Maileresque.
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A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.
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A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.
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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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Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.
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I would never write in response to what I believe the public wanted or needed.
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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.
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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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People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.
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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.´
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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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To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity.
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Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets.' (20)
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No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.
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The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there,' she said. 'This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.
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Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.
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