Quote

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.

Don DeLillo

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Failing
Continents
Failings
Sound
Languages
Tourist
Language
March
Tourism
Thought
Operations
Drift
Home
Stupidity
Tourists
Back
Escape
Cling
Able
Errors
Accountability
Way
Across
Operation
Suspending

More quotes by Don DeLillo

Image
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.´
Don DeLillo
Image
When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.
Don DeLillo
Image
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.
Don DeLillo
Image
Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.
Don DeLillo
Image
Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it.
Don DeLillo
Image
I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.
Don DeLillo
Image
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
Image
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
Image
In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.
Don DeLillo
Image
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
Image
There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist? (155)
Don DeLillo
Image
The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you've killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it's ordinary murder.
Don DeLillo
Image
Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.
Don DeLillo
Image
How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?
Don DeLillo
Image
I marched and I protested against the war in Vietnam, along with many, many thousands of others. But I never quite understood the bombs that were placed in science labs or office buildings.
Don DeLillo
Image
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.
Don DeLillo
Image
What terrorists gain, novelists lose.
Don DeLillo
Image
The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.
Don DeLillo
Image
Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.
Don DeLillo
Image
Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S. Why not use it?
Don DeLillo