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
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.
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.
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.
When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don't have an audience; I have a set of standards.
We surrounded ourselves with smoke and loud noise. That's the way we chose to live. I'm prepared to defend it.
Technology is lust removed from nature.
What terrorists gain, novelists lose.
Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.
In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.
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.
Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.
The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?
There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.