Don DeLillo Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Identity, Form

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.143, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

  Don DeLillo

  Hero, Writing, Identity

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.143, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Thinking, Form

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.87, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Thinking, People

• It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

  Don DeLillo

  Book, Writing, Three

  "Don DeLillo: 'I'm not trying to manipulate reality - this is what I see and hear'" by Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. August 7, 2010.

• It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Thinking, Years

• I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Thinking, Trying

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.87, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Reflection, Space

  Don DeLillo (2003). “Cosmopolis: A Novel”, p.174, Simon and Schuster

• He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, World, Paper

  Don DeLillo (2016). “Mao II”, p.76, Pan Macmillan

• I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.

  Don DeLillo

  Hurt, Writing, Want

  Don DeLillo (2004). “Cosmopolis: A Novel”, p.150, Simon and Schuster

• In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Demand, Language

  "Living in dangerous times". Interview with Kevin Nance, www.chicagotribune.com. October 12, 2012.

• In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending. So for much of the period in which I'm writing, I'm waiting to understand what's going to happen next, and how and where it's going to happen. In some cases, fairly early in the process, I do know how a book will end. But most of the time, not at all, and in this particular case, many questions are still unanswered, even though I've been working for months.

  Don DeLillo

  Book, Writing, Waiting

  "Living in dangerous times". Interview with Kevin Nance, articles.chicagotribune.com. October 12, 2012.

• 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

  Photography, Wedding, Writing

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.80, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Needs, Looks

  "Interviews with Don DeLillo". Cinerepublic Interview, perival.com. April 22, 2012.

• I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Thinking, Language

  "Living in dangerous times". Interview with Kevin Nance, articles.chicagotribune.com. October 12, 2012.

• I would never write in response to what I believe the public wanted or needed.

  Don DeLillo

  Believe, Writing, Needed

  Interviews with Don DeLillo, perival.com. December 15, 2016.

• In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary
  from book to book. But in many books, there is a colloquialism of address. The characters will speak in a quite idiosyncratic way sometimes.

  Don DeLillo

  Book, Writing, Character

  Interview with Martha Lavey, www.steppenwolf.org.

• It's impossible to write about the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath without taking note of twenty-five years of paranoia which has collected around that event.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Years, Twenties

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.38, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• 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

  Jobs, Writing, Fiction

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.78, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• That's how you write novels actually. You suddenly hit upon something and you realize this is the path you were meant to take. You'd be a fool if you didn't follow it. Perhaps it's like solving a difficult question in pure mathematics. There must be a moment when the solution is so simple and evident that you wonder why you hadn't come upon it before. When you do come upon it, you know it in the deepest part of your being. It carries its own logic.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Simple, Difficult Questions

  "The Day John Kennedy Died". Interview with Jonh Wilde, perival.com. November 19, 1988.

• I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. 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

  Jobs, Writing, Fiction

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.78, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

  Don DeLillo

  Religious, Book, Writing

• You become a serious novelist by living long enough.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Long, Novelists

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.126, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.'

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Found, Said

  "On Authors: Interviews with literary giants, 1995-2012 (Guardian Shorts Book 51)". Book by Robert McCrum, October 17, 2012.

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