Don DeLillo

May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.

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

I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.

Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.

I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.

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

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?

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

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.

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

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

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?

The future belongs to crowds.

American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

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.

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.

I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.