A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn't live his life in a certain way, this death is an introduction to an eternity of pain.
- Don DeLillo Quote

America was and is the immigrant's dream.
- Don DeLillo Quote

Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
- Don DeLillo Quote

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.
- Don DeLillo Quote

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
- Don DeLillo Quote

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.
- Don DeLillo Quote

I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it.
- Don DeLillo Quote

I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?
- Don DeLillo Quote

I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.
- Don DeLillo Quote

I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.
- Don DeLillo Quote

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.
- Don DeLillo Quote

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
- Don DeLillo Quote

In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.
- Don DeLillo Quote

It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture.
- Don DeLillo Quote

Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.
- Don DeLillo Quote

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.
- Don DeLillo Quote

People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.
- Don DeLillo Quote

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.
- Don DeLillo Quote

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.
- Don DeLillo Quote

The future belongs to crowds.
- Don DeLillo Quote

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
- Don DeLillo Quote

There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.
- Don DeLillo Quote

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.
- Don DeLillo Quote

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.
- Don DeLillo Quote

When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.
- Don DeLillo Quote