Don DeLillo Quotes About Language

• Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.

  Don DeLillo

  Pain, Reality, Lightning

  Don DeLillo (2011). “White Noise”, p.321, Pan Macmillan

• 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.

  Don DeLillo

  Inspiration, Fiction, Way

  "Q&A: Don DeLillo / It's not as easy as it looks / DeLillo talks about writing plays, watching sports and movies, and defining love and death". Interview with John Freeman, www.sfgate.com. March 5, 2006.

• Viajar en avión nos recuerda quiénes somos. Es el medio por el que nos reconocemos modernos. El proceso nos aparta del mundo y nos distingue de los demás. Deambulamos entre el ruido ambiente, comprobando una vez más el cupón de vuelo, la tarjeta de embarque, el visado. El proceso nos convence de que en cualquier momento tendremos que someternos a la fuerza implícita en todo esto, a la autoridad desconocida que hay detrás, detrás de las categorías, de las lenguas que no entendemos. Esta inmensa terminal se ha erigido para examinar almas.

  Don DeLillo

  Mean, Air, Convince Us

  Don DeLillo (2012). “The Names”, p.254, Vintage

• We feel certain that the extraterrestrial message is a mathematical code of some kind. Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality.

  Don DeLillo

  Independent, Intelligent, Reality

• At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her.

  Don DeLillo

  Estrellas, Noche, Cielo

  Don DeLillo (2011). “The Body Artist”, p.25, Pan Macmillan

• Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

  Don DeLillo

  Past, Language, Amenities

  Don DeLillo (2001). “The Body Artist: A Novel”, p.99, Simon and Schuster

• If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.

  Don DeLillo

  Art, Challenges, Novelists

  "Don DeLillo's Hidden Truths". Interview with David Streitfield, perival.com. November 11, 1997.

• There's something nearly mystical about certain words and phrases that float through our lives. It's computer mysticism. Words that are computer generated to be used on products that might be sold anywhere from Japan to Denmark - words devised to be pronounceable in a hundred languages. And when you detach one of these words from the product it was designed to serve, the words acquires a chantlike quality.

  Don DeLillo

  Japan, Quality, Phrases

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.97, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this 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. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

  Don DeLillo

  Integrity, Book, Men

• First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there's a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger.

  Don DeLillo

  Letting Go, Exercise, Ideas

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.90, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• I think it's only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place. But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes.

  Don DeLillo

  Country, Fall, Cutting

  Don DeLillo (2012). “The Names”, p.58, Vintage

• I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

  Don DeLillo

  Thinking, Culture, Fiction

  "Exile on Main Street: Don DeLillo's Undisclosed Underworld". David Remnick, The New Yorker, September 15, 1997.

• 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

  Integrity, Swings, Literature

  Don DeLillo (1992). “Mao II: A Novel”, p.48, Penguin

• For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

  Don DeLillo

  Religious, Book, Writing

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

  Don DeLillo

  Book, Men, Language

  Don DeLillo (1992). “Mao II: A Novel”, p.48, Penguin

• In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending. So for much of the period in which I'm writing, I'm waiting to understand what's going to happen next, and how and where it's going to happen. In some cases, fairly early in the process, I do know how a book will end. But most of the time, not at all, and in this particular case, many questions are still unanswered, even though I've been working for months.

  Don DeLillo

  Book, Writing, Waiting

  "Living in dangerous times". Interview with Kevin Nance, articles.chicagotribune.com. October 12, 2012.

• El verdadero terror es un lenguaje y una visión. Hay una profunda estructura narrativa en los actos terroristas, y se infiltran y alteran la conciencia de un modo al que solían aspirar los escritores.

  Don DeLillo

  Narrative Structure, Vision, Literature

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.84, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity.

  Don DeLillo

  Home, Errors, Stupidity

  1982 James Axton. The Names, ch.3.

• I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Thinking, Language

  "Living in dangerous times". Interview with Kevin Nance, articles.chicagotribune.com. October 12, 2012.

• In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Demand, Language

  "Living in dangerous times". Interview with Kevin Nance, www.chicagotribune.com. October 12, 2012.

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