Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo
Donald Richard "Don" DeLillois an American novelist, playwright and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, politics, economics, and global terrorism. Initially a well-regarded cult writer, the publication in 1985 of White Noise brought him widespread recognition. It was followed in 1988 by Libra, a bestseller. DeLillo has twice been a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist), won the...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 November 1936
CityBronx, NY
Sex finds us. Sex sees through us. That's why it's so shattering. It strips us of appearances.
Famous people don't want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there's something crawling in their clothes.
Writers, some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren't noticed in the way that a writer might notice.
I think fiction recues history from its confusions.
I think silence is the condition you accept as the judgment on your crimes.
To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.
I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.
Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S. Why not use it?
A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.
There is no lie in war or preparation of war that can't be defended.
A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require.
Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously, I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered.
Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.
Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake. And I'm the actor made up for the laying-out.