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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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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
Like
Pretty
World
Came
Mailer
Actually
Norman
Change
Managing
Anything
Task
Wanted
Changing
Never
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Think
Consciousness

More quotes by Don DeLillo

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Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.
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I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.
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Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.
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I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.
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It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.
Don DeLillo
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To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.
Don DeLillo
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Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it.
Don DeLillo
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First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there's a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger.
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I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let's not say men. Let's say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.
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Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.
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If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.
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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
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The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.
Don DeLillo
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America was and is the immigrant's dream.
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It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.
Don DeLillo
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We need time to lose interest in things.
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.
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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.
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There are two categories of writers, it could be said: The author who is just a voice, and the one who is also creating a picture. I belong to the latter, because I have an acute visual sense.
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Let's enjoy the aimless days while we still can.
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