Quotessence
Home / Authors / Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo Quotes

Writer

Filter quotes by topic

AllThinkingPeopleWorldIfsKnowsLiteratureWritingWayLanguageWantNovelKindFormMenArtFictionBookDiesTechnologyYears

Famous Don DeLillo Quotes

“Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake. And I'm the actor made up for the laying-out.”

PeopleYearsLooksKindMeanMadeMatterWholePastFacesActorsPowerfulFiveSubjectsSittingTwentiesPhotographDeeperDecadesFive YearsClothingsPortraitsSentimentalInventingTwenty FiveMorbidPicture Taking
Book:Mao II
Create image

“The best moments involve a loss of control. It's a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often - completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages - I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.”

ThinkingKindStatesMomentsHappensLossPoetHigherPeriodsPagesAccessCombinationNovelistsPhrasesSurprisingParagraphRaptureBest Moments
Author:Don DeLillo
Create image

“For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.”

ThinkingWritingKindBookRealitySeemsFacesLanguageReligiousFictionMeditationModernEnlightenmentFinalsPlotShiftingModern LifeAmbiguityTextureNeatQuaint
Author:Don DeLillo
Create image

“I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.”

ThinkingWritingKindLanguageShareConcernedParagraphIndirect
Author:Don DeLillo
Create image

“There is a balance, a kind of standoff between the time continuum and the human entity, our frail bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it's true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second.... We were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time.”

WorldWayMindHumansKindBodyTimeNextSonDependsBalanceCreaturesDaughterClockMusclesBrownLife And DeathDevicesStationsKeep GoingCrucialGenesSmallestEntityDistributionMind And BodyFrailBundlesTheoristsContinuumSomaJugsStandoffsFactoring
Book:Underworld: Picador Classic
Create image

“We feel certain that the extraterrestrial message is a mathematical code of some kind. Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality.”

FeelsKindRealityMightFormCertainUniverseLanguageCommonNumbersPerceptionMessagesIntelligentMathematicsIndependentAliensMathematicalCodeUfoExtraterrestrialIntelligent Life
Author:Don DeLillo
Create image