Don Delillo

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.

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

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

He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.

Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.

I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.

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

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

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

As belief shrinks from the world, it is more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.

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

Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be.

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

And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now.

It is interesting ... how weapons reflect the soul of the maker.

Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours,man-hours, using labor more efficiently.

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.

The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.