Quotes by Don DeLillo

A naked woman was amazing.Hed never seen it this way, in full light, without half-off clothes or a beach blanket across the lap or sex in a dark car. This was her whole body naked in light, standing and lying and front and back and open and showing and then different when she walked, surer than he was, unclunky and smooth-moving, with parts that didnt bounce. She knew how to be naked. She looked like shed been raised naked in this room, a skinny girl when she was a girl, probably, and skinny in a certain way, with a little bulgy belly and ashamed of her feet, but grown out of shyness and wrong proportions now, and being married of course, used to being seen, and she didnt have curves and swerves but was good looking naked and stuck to him when they fucked like a thing fighting for light, a great wet papery moth.

People get bitten. But I wont. I found myself saying, You will, you will. These snakes dont know you find death inconceivable. They dont know youre young and strong and you think death applies to everyone but you. They will bite you and you will die.

How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature.

Man’s guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.

We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. No one sees the barn, he said finally. A long silence followed. Once youve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.Were not here to capture an image, were here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies. There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. Weve agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism. Another silence ensued. They are taking pictures of taking pictures, he said.

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube. The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you’ve killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it’s ordinary murder.

This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. - Murray (WN 285)

As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.

Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We dont need God or miracles or the flight of the bumble bee. But it is also crouched and undecidable. It can go either way.

You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out - Murray (WN 285).

You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.

You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels.Its own grave-diggers, he said.But these are not the grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They dont exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside.The camera tracked a cop chasing a young man through the crowd, an image that seemed to exist at some drifting distance from the moment.The market culture is total. It breeds these men and women. They are necessary to the system they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are market-driven. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate the system.

Doesnt seem quite real. Its not meaningful. I cant quite imagine myself being 73. Thats the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? Its weird.

He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows.

You need to know things the others dont know. Its what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

Secrets are an exalted state, almost a dream state. Theyre a way of arresting motion, stopping the world so we can see ourselves in it.

Steffie took my hand and we walked past the fruit bins, an area that extended about forty-five yards along one wall. The bins were arranged diagonally and backed my mirrors that people accidentally punched when reaching for fruit in upper rows.

Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.

Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?