Quote

A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require.

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
Tried
Frame
Beyond
Require
Novel
Shape
Idea
Determine
Ideas
Seemed
Never
Size
Shapes
Determines
Structure
Stretch

More quotes by Don DeLillo

Image
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
Image
I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.
Don DeLillo
Image
People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.
Don DeLillo
Image
I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.
Don DeLillo
Image
What terrorists gain, novelists lose.
Don DeLillo
Image
Everything I've stated may prove to be total poppycock.... Perhaps time will tell. Perhaps time will do nothing of the kind.
Don DeLillo
Image
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
Image
World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.
Don DeLillo
Image
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
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
Don DeLillo
Image
In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.
Don DeLillo
Image
You become a serious novelist by living long enough.
Don DeLillo
Image
Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.
Don DeLillo
Image
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
Image
I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.
Don DeLillo
Image
You gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.
Don DeLillo
Image
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
Image
Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals.
Don DeLillo
Image
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
Image
May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.
Don DeLillo