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
It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.'
It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line.
True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.
I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.
People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.
In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.
Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don't let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth-century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?
Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.
The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.
Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.
Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.
Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.
When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.
As belief shrinks from the world, it is more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.