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Naturally a direct comparison of terrorist and novelist is complete nonsense. But there was once a time when the novelist also had some influence on how his contemporaries thought, the way they saw the world, the way they lived.

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
Also
Naturally
Way
Terrorist
Time
Complete
World
Direct
Contemporaries
Lived
Novelist
Saws
Novelists
Influence
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More quotes by Don DeLillo

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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
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If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
Don DeLillo
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the instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms
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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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Hardship makes the world obscure.
Don DeLillo
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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.
Don DeLillo
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People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.
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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America was and is the immigrant's dream.
Don DeLillo
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The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.
Don DeLillo
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Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.
Don DeLillo
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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
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The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.
Don DeLillo
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It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.
Don DeLillo
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I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.
Don DeLillo
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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
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Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.
Don DeLillo
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It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.
Don DeLillo
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I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.
Don DeLillo