A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn't live his life in a certain way, this death is an introduction to an eternity of pain.
Don DeLillo

America was and is the immigrant's dream.
Don DeLillo

American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.
Don DeLillo

Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
Don DeLillo

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.
Don DeLillo

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
Don DeLillo

Hardship makes the world obscure.
Don DeLillo

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

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.
Don DeLillo

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.
Don DeLillo


I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.
Don DeLillo

I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it.
Don DeLillo

I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.
Don DeLillo

I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?
Don DeLillo

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.
Don DeLillo

I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.
Don DeLillo

I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.
Don DeLillo

I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.
Don DeLillo

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

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.
Don DeLillo