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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

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Don DeLillo
Age: 87
Born: 1936
Born: November 20
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Don Delillo
Donald Richard DeLillo
Beyond
Require
Novel
Shape
Idea
Determine
Ideas
Seemed
Never
Size
Shapes
Determines
Structure
Stretch
Tried
Frame

More quotes by Don DeLillo

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The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?
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Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.
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The world is shrinking into a kind of technological funnel. I think people are drawn into their technological devices, and this becomes a kind of subjective universe, into which much of the rest of the world simply does not enter.
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That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.
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If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.
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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.´
Don DeLillo
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Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?' What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing
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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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I would never write in response to what I believe the public wanted or needed.
Don DeLillo
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You gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.
Don DeLillo
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People will always make comparisons.
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We commit our crimes at night and reveal ourselves in the high noon of studio lights.
Don DeLillo
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Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past.
Don DeLillo
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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.
Don DeLillo
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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
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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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Facts are lonely things.
Don DeLillo
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The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
Don DeLillo
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There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.
Don DeLillo
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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.
Don DeLillo