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
I am very unmusical. I can't carry a tune. I would never be able to play an instrument.
Longing on a large scale makes history.
Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.
If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.
The music I like best is kind of frozen in my mind from the Sixties and Seventies. I still listen to the same jazz music I listened to when I was eighteen years old, and like and admire it just as much.
In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled.
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.
Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.
The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.
I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.
Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.
Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.