Quotes by Don DeLillo

Vanity is a defensive quality. it contains an element of fear.

I slept for four years. I didnt study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.

Theres always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.

Its no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture.

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.

I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it.

The future belongs to crowds.

“Time and death: Its the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. Its just whats there. It was not something I planned to do.”

“Ive got death inside me. Its just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.”

“The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.”

“No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.”

“Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me. I spent my life in small steamy delicatessens with slanted display cabinets full of trays that hold soft wet lumpy matter in pale colours. High enough cabinets so you had to stand on tiptoes to give your order. Shouts, accents. In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. Its everywhere and nowhere. Men shout as they die to be noticed, remembered for a second or two. To die in an apartment instead of a house can depress the soul, I would imagine, for several lives to come. In a town there are houses, plants in bay windows. People notice dying better. The dead have faces, automobiles. If you dont know a name you know a street name, a dogs name. He drove an orange Mazda. You know a couple of useless things about a person that become major facts of identification and cosmic placement when he dies suddenly, after a short illness, in his own bed, with a comforter and matching pillows, on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, feverish, a little congested in the sinuses and chest, thinking about his dry cleaning.”

“When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and Im dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.”