The question is can you cure the disease before it kills you? Once you set out consciously to cure the disease, as I did even before I knew the word cancer, you run the risk of catching it. Comprende? Whatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you. Poetry kills you if you’re a poet, and so on. People choose their death whether they know it or not.

— Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo Quotes

There is only one truth. Whoever controls your eyeballs runs the world.

— Don DeLillo

Minnesota is a human moment.

— Don DeLillo

Maybe that was the answer I needed, the one route back. So simple. To decide to love the age.

— Don DeLillo

We start our lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that’s not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual.

— Don DeLillo

I tell myself I have reached an age, the age of unreliable menace. The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

— Don DeLillo

A writer creates a character as a way to reveal consciousness, increase the flow of meaning. This is how we reply to power and beat back our fear.

— Don DeLillo

Men in small rooms, in isolation. A cell is the basic state. They put you in a room and lock the door. So simple it’s a form of genius. This is the final size of all the forces around you. Eight by fifteen.

— Don DeLillo

It’s the novelist who understand the secret life, the rage that underlies all obscurity and neglect. You’re half murderers, most of you.

— Don DeLillo

It’s the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent.

— Don DeLillo

Behind me, his bedroom light went out, brightening the sky, and how queer it seemed, half the heavens coming nearer, all those incandescent masses increasing in number, the stars and constellations, because somebody turns off a light in a house in the desert...

— Don DeLillo

The desert was clairvoyant, this is what he’d always believed, that the landscape unravels and reveals, it knows future as well as past.

— Don DeLillo

Writing was bad for the soul when you got right down to it. It protected your worst tendencies. Narrowed everything to failure and its devastations. Gave your cunning an edge of treachery and your jellyfish heart a reason to fall deeper into silence.

— Don DeLillo

It makes me feel true to the system, knowing that unnecessary risk is integral to the code of urban pathology.

— Don DeLillo

We learn nothing from the stereotypes around us, not even that we’re all the same.

— Don DeLillo

Aren’t you going too far?” “I’m from New York.

— Don DeLillo

People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.

— Don DeLillo

All the amazement that’s left in the world is microscopic.

— Don DeLillo

Then there was a second male voice from the flight deck, this one remarkably calm and precise, making the passengers believe there was someone in charge after all, an element of hope: “This is American two-one-three to the cockpit voice recorder. Now we know what it’s like. It is worse than we’d ever imagined. They didn’t prepare us for this at the death simulator in Denver. Our fear is pure, so totally stripped of distractions and pressures as to be a form of transcendental meditation.

— Don DeLillo

I liked being with Wilder. The world was a series of fleeting gratifications. He took what he could, then immediately forgot it in the rush of a subsequent pleasure. It was this forgetfulness I envied and admired.

— Don DeLillo

He is saying terror is what we use to give our people their place in the world. What used to be achieved through work, we gain through terror. Terror makes the new future possible. All men one man. Men live in history as never before. He is saying we make and change history minute by minute. History is not the book or the human memory. We do history in the morning and change it after lunch.

— Don DeLillo
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