Don DeLillo Self Quotations

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.

He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.

World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.

Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.

To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

I'd like to lose interest in myself ...

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.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.