Don Delillo

People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units.

The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there,' she said. 'This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.

Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.

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.

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

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

the instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms

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

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

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.

In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.

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.

People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.

Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.

World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.

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.

Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.

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

I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.

It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.