The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
Don DelilloRead
[I]n the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape. He is either on a horse or driving a car, depending, and either way he’s carrying a gun. This is one of the essential images in American mythology.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the solitary nature of individuals within the vastness of American culture and mythology.
Don Delillo's quote explores the theme of isolation that permeates the American experience. By depicting an individual either on horseback or in a car, armed and alone in a vast landscape, Delillo emphasizes a deep sense of personal freedom entwined with loneliness, which is a recurring motif in American mythology and identity.
Themes
LonelinessAmerican MythologyIndividualismLandscapeIdentity
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a discussion about American literature and its themes of individualism.
More from Don Delillo
All quotes →War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.
Don DelilloRead
American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.
Don DelilloRead
For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
Don DelilloRead
I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.
Don DelilloRead
There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.
Don DelilloRead
Similar quotes
In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
Roland BarthesRead
Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.
George WillRead
It is in the thick of calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence.
Albert CamusRead
In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington. It was the first time I felt like a human being.
Paul RobesonRead
The problem with people who are afraid of imagination, of fantasy, is that their world becomes so narrow that I don't see how they can imagine beyond what their senses can verify. We know from science that there are entire worlds that our senses can't verify.
Katherine PatersonRead
New York remains what it has always been : a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring - it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence.
Paul GoldbergerRead