Don DeLillo

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

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

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

Hardship makes the world obscure.

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.

Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.

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.

America was and is the immigrant's dream.

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.

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.

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

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

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.

In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.

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.

People will always make comparisons.

Rushdie is a hostage.

The language of my books has shaped me as a man.

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

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

Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

There's never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President.

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

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.