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

“Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts.”

ThinkingKnowsYearsMindEndsDreamLastsNightCertainFallFoundGrowsRoomsPowerfulMorningKnow HowStreetsFiguresBedGhostPassingPassingsLast TimeMistRailroadsSleepyEarly MorningBorderlineThinking Of Him
Book:Underworld: Picador Classic
Create image

“It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.”

ThinkingWritingYearsSaidTwoFormFoundNovelParticularExpectationsDeeperIntenseMessTwo YearsRealisingIncentives
Author:Don DeLillo
Create image

“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.”

ThinkingYearsHumansUsedCultureConsciousnessTakenYears AgoTerroristCuriousNovelistsBombsMakersTerritoryInner LifeKnotsHuman ConsciousnessGunmen
Author:Don DeLillo
Create image