Don DeLillo

“Weede si alzò in piedi per un secondo e piegò leggermente le ginocchia - come faceva sempre mio padre quando le mutande gli si incagliavano in qualche anfratto delle regioni inguinali, spiegando a me bambino che quel gesto era l'unica alternativa civile al disincagliamento manuale, sport preferito di emarginati e pazzi.”

“Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.”

“Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure.”

“When Lee has a certain look on his face, eyes kind of amused, mouth small and tight, he finds himself thinking of his father. He believes it is a look his father may have used. It feels like his father. A curious sensation, the look coming upon him, taking hold in an unmistakable way, and then his old man is here, eerie and forceful and whole, a meeting across worlds.”

“The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.”

“That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.”

“The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.”

“The art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way.”

“Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another's care and protection.”

“We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.”

“The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.”

“Decorative gestures add romance to a life.”

“Something lurked inside the truth.”

“A surface separates inside from out and belongs no less to one than the other.”

“The instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms. Then she wedged herself through the narrow opening in the boards and he watched her cross the street. Nothing moved out there. She was the lone stroke of motion, crew and extras gone, equipment gone, and she was cool and silvery slim and walking head-high, with technical precision, toward the last trailer in the service station, where she would find her clothes, dress quickly and disappear.”

“slightly older men and women, they had professions and soft slacks with knife pleats and a certain ease of bearing and belonging, the package of attitudes and values known as lifestyle”

“Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it's not that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing.”

“And I knew with total certainty that a protection factor of fifteen was the highest level of sunblock scientifically possible. Now they were selling me a thirty.”

“I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.”

“You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.”

“Aún puedo verles en esa pantalla primitiva que nuestro cerebro produce, a unos ocho centímetros delante de mis ojos, miniaturizados por el tiempo y la distancia, desdibujados por las interferencias visuales, cada figura como una cinta roja que danzara en el aire. Todos ellos se cuentan entre aquellas personas a las que he intentado conocer dos veces, la segunda de ellas en el recuerdo y el lenguaje. A través de ellas, yo mismo. Son aquellos en lo que yo me he convertido, a través de procesos que no comprendo pero que creo que corresponden a una certeza absoluta, a una segunda vida tanto para mí como para ellos”

“The future belongs to crowds.”

“It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience...For that reason, reading a novel is potentially a significant act. Because there are so many varieties of human experience, so many kinds of interaction between humans, and so many ways of creating patterns in the novel that can’t be created in a short story, a play, a poem or a movie. The novel, simply, offers more opportunities for a reader to understand the world better, including the world of artistic creation. That sounds pretty grand, but I think it’s true.”

“When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it’s being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn’t have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing—maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world.”

“Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.”

“Maybe he didn't want that life after all, starting over broke, hailing a cab in a busy intersection filled with jockeying junior executives, arms aloft, bodies smartly spinning to cover every compass point. What did he want that was not posthumous? He stared into space. He understood what was missing, the predatory impulse, the sense of large excitation that drove him through his days, the sheer and reeling need to be.”

“As a volunteer reader to the blind, Babette had some reservations about the old gent's appetite for the unspeakable and seamy, believing that the handicapped were morally bound to higher types of entertainment. If we couldn't look to them for victories of the human spirit, who could we look to? They had an example to set just as she did as a reader and morale-booster. But she was professional in her duty, reading to him with high earnestness, as to a child, about dead men who leave messages on answering machines.”

“If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word "identity" has reached an end.”

“I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.”

“It is all falling indelibly into the past.”

“It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.”

“Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now.”

“We are not native. We have no generations of Americans behind us. We have roots elsewhere. We are looking in from the outside. To me, that seems to be perfectly natural.”

“I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.”

“I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.”

“It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.”

“When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.”

“But then it came time for me to make my journey—into America. [... N]o coincidence that my first novel is called Americana. That became my subject, the subject that shaped my work. When I get a French translation of one of my books that says 'translated from the American', I think, 'Yes, that's exactly right.”

“Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.”

“Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.”

“The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.”

“Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.”

“I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.”

“I do not want to talk about it.”

“There's the life and there's the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie? Everything seeks its own heightened version.”

“They’ve grown comfortable with their money,’ I said. ‘They genuinely believe they’re entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.”

“For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.”

“There is a world inside the world.”

“These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of species. What could be more useless than a man who couldn't fix a dripping faucet—fundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes? I wasn't sure I disagreed.”

“Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.”