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The dead have a presence.

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
Presence
Dead
Death

More quotes by Don DeLillo

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the instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms
Don DeLillo
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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.
Don DeLillo
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Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?
Don DeLillo
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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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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.
Don DeLillo
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Pain is just another form of information.
Don DeLillo
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The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.
Don DeLillo
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Something lurked inside the truth.
Don DeLillo
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You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.
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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People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It's simply how we live.
Don DeLillo
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Coming and going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never. And I have seen what I will see. If I am where I will be. Because nothing comes between me.
Don DeLillo
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I felt myself getting whiter... What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in?
Don DeLillo
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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.
Don DeLillo
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Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.
Don DeLillo
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A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.
Don DeLillo
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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.
Don DeLillo
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I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.
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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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