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
dream morning powerful
Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts.
country powerful war
Murray said, ´I don´t trust anybody´s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.´
powerful mean past
Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake. And I'm the actor made up for the laying-out.
morning powerful trying
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?
convincing dominant force middle people realize sit sitting women
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.
across bind cars coming deep drop faces fly forgotten high hot knowing numbered office painted people ride run seats secret shirts sit smell sneak stand stare themselves thousands time water white zones
Thousands stand and chant. Around them in the world, people ride escalators going up and sneak secret glances at the faces coming down. People dangle teabags over hot water in white cups. Cars run silently on the autobahns, streaks of painted light. People sit at desks and stare at office walls. They smell their shirts and drop them in the hamper. People bind themselves into numbered seats and fly across time zones and high cirrus and deep night, knowing there is something they've forgotten to do.
alone american-novelist concept invented warrants
Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
american-novelist eating form people
It occured to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.
certain history point seen
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.
alter human inner life novelist possible raids taken writers
Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunman have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.
true-life
Words are not necessary to one's experience of the true life.
art people glimpse
People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.
book men language
The language of my books has shaped me as a man.
may action plans
May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.