Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo
Donald Richard "Don" DeLillois an American novelist, playwright and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, politics, economics, and global terrorism. Initially a well-regarded cult writer, the publication in 1985 of White Noise brought him widespread recognition. It was followed in 1988 by Libra, a bestseller. DeLillo has twice been a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist), won the...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 November 1936
CityBronx, NY
First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there's a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger.
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.
Naturally a direct comparison of terrorist and novelist is complete nonsense. But there was once a time when the novelist also had some influence on how his contemporaries thought, the way they saw the world, the way they lived.
I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read. I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.
Something lurked inside the truth.
All human existence is a trick of light.
Certainly I've never tried to imagine what the future will hold. It's a hopeless endeavor to try to do such a thing...
It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at.
Sex finds us. Sex sees through us. That's why it's so shattering. It strips us of appearances.
Famous people don't want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there's something crawling in their clothes.
Writers, some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren't noticed in the way that a writer might notice.
I think fiction recues history from its confusions.
I think silence is the condition you accept as the judgment on your crimes.
To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.