The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
Don DelilloRead
Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.
Interpretation
Stories must engage with our fears to hold significance.
This quote by Don Delillo emphasizes the importance of authenticity and emotional depth in storytelling. It suggests that for a narrative to resonate and be meaningful, it must confront and reflect the profound fears and anxieties that we as humans experience, thereby absorbing and addressing the terror within us.
In practice
In a writing workshop, this quote can inspire participants to delve deeper into their characters' struggles.
The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.
American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.
For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
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.
[I]n the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape. β¨He is either on a horse or driving a car, depending, and either way heβs carrying a gun. β¨This is one of the essential images in American mythology.
Renunciation mind has nothing to do with sacrificing. When we talk about renunciation, somwhow we get all scared because we think that we have to give up some goodies, somehing valuable, some important things. But there is nothing that is important; there is nothing that is solidly exisiting. All that you are give up is actually a vague identity . You realize thigs is not true; it's noe the ultimate. This how and why to develop renunciation
That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.
Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves.
Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, Iβm stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else.
When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.
So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.
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