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Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

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
Things
Attack
Market
Reader
Age
Knowledge
Less
Making
Difficult
Facile

More quotes by 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
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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?
Don DeLillo
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To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.
Don DeLillo
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May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.
Don DeLillo
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Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.
Don DeLillo
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Let's enjoy the aimless days while we still can.
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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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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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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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.
Don DeLillo
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He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.
Don DeLillo
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Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.
Don DeLillo
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I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.
Don DeLillo
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Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals.
Don DeLillo
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Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.
Don DeLillo
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I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.
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.
Don DeLillo
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In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.
Don DeLillo
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Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
Don DeLillo
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I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.
Don DeLillo