Don DeLillo

“Let's examine the nature of the beast, so to speak. The male animal. Isn't there a fund, a pool, a reservoir of potential violence in the male psyche?… Isn't there a deep field, a sort of crude oil deposit that one might tap if and when the occasion warrants? A great dark lake of male rage. ... Isn't there a sludgy region you'd rather not know about? A remnant of some prehistoric period when dinosaurs roamed the earth and men fought with flint tools? When to kill was to live? ... Only your code allows you to enter the system.”

“A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.”

“The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence. Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God.”

“It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself. A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying.”

“Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it.”

“People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units.”

“The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there,' she said. 'This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.”

“Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours, man-hours, using labor more efficiently.”

“The truth of the world is exhausting.”

“The falling away of things we carry around with us, twilight and chimney smoke.”

“Is there a fungus that speaks to you? I'm serious. People hear things. They hear God."He meant it. He was serious. He wanted to mean it, to hear anything the man might say, the wholeshapeless narrative of his unraveling.”

“No. Your crime has no conscience. You haven't been driven to do it by some oppressive socialforce. How I hate to be reasonable. You're not against the rich. Nobody's against the rich. Everybody'sten seconds from being rich. Or so everybody thought. No. Your crime is in your head. Another foolshooting up a diner because because”

“He thought of firing a shot into the lock for the sheer cinematic stupidity of the gesture.”

“Property is no longer about power, personality andcommand. It's not about vulgar display or tasteful display. Because it no longer has weight or shape.The only thing that matters is the price you pay. Yourself, Eric, think. What did you buy for your onehundred and four million dollars? Not dozens of rooms, incomparable views, private elevators. Not therotating bedroom and computerized bed. Not the swimming pool or the shark. Was it air rights? Theregulating sensors and software? Not the mirrors that tell you how you feel when you look at yourselfin the morning. You paid the money for the number itself. One hundred and four million. This is whatyou bought. And it's worth it. The number justifies itself.”

“The novel is a fucking killer. I try to show it every respect.”

“When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.”

“He liked the fact that the cars were indistinguishable from each other. He wanted such a car because he thought it was a platonic replica, weightless for all its size, less an object than an idea. But he knew this wasn't true. This was something he said for effect and he didn't believe it for an instant. He believed it for an instant but only just. He wanted the car because it was not only oversized but aggressively and contemptuously so, metastasizingly so, a tremendous mutant thing that stood astride every argument against it.”

“Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn't it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don't want to go to Montana. How do I know I really want to go and it isn't just some neurons firing or something? Maybe it's just an accidental flash in the medulla and suddenly there I am in Montana and I find out I really didn't want to go there in the first place. I can't control what happens in my brain, so how can I be sure what I want to do ten seconds from now, much less Montana next summer? It's all this activity in the brain and you don't know what's you as a person and what's some neuron that just happens to fire or just happens to misfire.”

“She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear.Eric Packer about Vija Kinski”

“There was something theatrical about the protest, ingratiating even. . . . There was a shadow of transaction between the demonstrators and the state. The protest was a form of systemic hygiene, purging and lubricating. It attested again, for the ten thousandth time, to the market culture’s innovative brilliance, its ability to shape itself to its own flexible ends, absorbing everything around it.”

“We must be equal to the largeness of things.”

“I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.”

“People eat and sleep in the shadow of what we do”

“Now this girl was about twenty-one years old. A sweet little coed. Spends a night with a married man. Goes home the next day and tells her mama and daddy. Don’t ask me why. Maybe just to rub their faces in it. They decide she needs a lesson. Whole family drives out into the desert, right out to that spot we just passed. All three of them plus the girl’s pet dog. Papa tells the girl to dig a shallow grave. Mama gets down on her hands and knees and holds the dog by the collar. When the girl is all through digging, papa gives her a .22 caliber revolver and tells her to shoot the dog. A real touching family scene. Make a good calendar for some religious group to give away. The girl puts the weapon to her temple and kills herself. Now isn’t that a heartwarming story? Restores my faith in just about everything.”

“I like simple men and complicated women.”

“It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.”

“The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings.”

“A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.”

“Air travel reminds us who we are. It’s the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don’t understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.”

“People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.”

“In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It’s the drowning out of false voices.”

“The shallower our arguments, the more intense we became.”

“If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought,” he said, “the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.”We loved the idea of being everyday crazy. It rang so true, so real.“In our privatest mind,” he said, “there is only chaos and blur. We invented logic to beat back our creatural selves. We assert or deny. We follow M with N.”Our privatest mind, we thought. Did he really say that?“The only laws that matter are laws of thought.”His fists were clenched on the tabletop, knuckles white.“The rest is devil worship," he said.”

“I think of kids. It makes me feel selfish, to be so wary of having a family. Never mind do I have a job or not. I'll have a job soon, a good one. That's not it. I'm in awe of raising, basically, someone so tiny and soft.”

“It is just so interesting," he says at last. "The colors and all."The colors and all.”

“L'azione è verità, e la verità vacilla quando la guerra finisce e gli abitanti del villaggio sono liberi di tornare ai loro campi. Sopravviviamo, e siamo nuovamente sconfitti.”

“Te lo ricordi com'era, sudare sotto le coperte, da bambini? La febbre è una cosa segreta. È come cadere in un buco dove nessuno può seguirti, ma non provi né paura né dolore perché non ti senti neanche te stesso. Io adoro raggomitolarmi nel sudore.”

“Le trame possiedono una logica. C'è una tendenza, nelle trame, a evolvere in direzione della morte.”

“Voglio dirti una cosa che non dovresti dimenticarti mai. Se qualcuno ti dà fastidio una volta e poi un'altra e un'altra e un'altra ancora, qualcuno con delle ambizioni, qualcuno avido di territorio, la prima regola da osservare è mirare in alto. In altre parole, al massimo livello. È Lassù che stanno perdendo il controllo della situazione. In altre parole, bisogna andare dritti al vertice. Bisogna fare fuori il numero uno. In altre parole, bisogna fare in modo che al vertice ci sia un uomo nuovo che capisca il messaggio e cambi politica. Se tagli la testa, la coda non si dimena più.”

“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.”

“Isn't it possible that this midcentury moment enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping strategies of eminent leaders, generals steely in their sunglasses -- the mapped visions that pierce our dreams?”

“There was something touching about the fact that Murray was dressed almost totally in corduroy.”

“As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or "terror in a lonely place," the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind. As a mathematician he was free from subjection to reality, free to impose his ideas and designs on his own test environment. The only valid standard for his work, its critical point (zero or infinity), was the beauty it possessed, the deft strength of his mathematical reasoning. THe work's ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was his own principle of intelligence or individual consciousness; his identity, in short. This was the infalling trap, the source of art's private involvement with obsession and despair, neither more nor less than the artist's self-containment, a mental state that led to storms of overwork and extended stretches of depression, that brought on indifference to life and at times the need to regurgitate it, to seek the level of expelled matter. Of course, the sense at the end of a serious effort, if the end is reached successfully, is one of lyrical exhilaration. There is air to breathe and a place to stand. The work gradually reveals its attachment to the charged particles of other minds, men now historical, the rediscovered dead; to the main structure of mathematical thought; perhaps even to reality itself, the so-called sum of things. It is possible to stand in time's pinewood dust and admire one's own veronicas and pavanes.”

“Coming and going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never. And I have seen what I will see. If I am where I will be. Because nothing comes between me.”

“Billy tried to imagine the birth of Cyril's wife's baby. It would happen in grim lights violently. A dripping thing trying to clutch to its hole. Dredged up and beaten. Blood and drool and womb mud. How cute, this neon shrieker made to plunge upward, odd-headed blob, this marginal electric glow-thing. Dressed and powdered now. Engineered to abstract design. Cling, suck and cry. Follow with the eye. Gloom and drought of unprotected sleep. Had there been a light in her belly, dim briny light in that pillowing womb, dusk enough to light a page, bacterial smear of light, an amniotic gleam that I could taste, old, deep, wet and warm? Return, return to negative unity.”

“Someday you'll be a grown-up ... and then your mother will have no one to talk to.”

“Every act he performed was self-haunted and synthetic.”

“You live in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God.”

“I'm a world citizen with a New York set of balls.”

“Man’s guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.”