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
Don't you realize that as long as you have to sit down to pee, you'll never be a dominant force in the world? You'll never be a convincing technocrat or middle manager. Because people will know. She's in there sitting down.
People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.
Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire--not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.
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.
Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.
People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It's simply how we live.
There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.
People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.
Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets.' (20)
It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space.
Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.
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.
The world is shrinking into a kind of technological funnel. I think people are drawn into their technological devices, and this becomes a kind of subjective universe, into which much of the rest of the world simply does not enter.