Quote

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

More quotes by Don DeLillo

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Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.
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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.
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The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire.
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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.
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Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination.
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I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next.
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American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.
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I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.
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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.
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The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. (Point Omega)
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I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.
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Because friends have to be brutally honest with each other. I'd feel terrible if I didn't tell you what I was thinking, especially at a time like this
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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.
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It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.
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Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.
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I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography.
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Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.
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People will always make comparisons.
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A dead afternoon in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.
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All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.
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