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 the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.
Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.
In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.
These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.
Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.
We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.
I think my work is influenced by the fact that we're living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times.
There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.
And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?
I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next.
There are two categories of writers, it could be said: The author who is just a voice, and the one who is also creating a picture. I belong to the latter, because I have an acute visual sense.
Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.
Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.
What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.