Don DeLillo

Computer power eliminates doubt. All doubt rises from past experience. But the past is disappearing. We used to know the past but not the future. This is changing.

"There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated."

"Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror."

When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear.

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

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

The future belongs to crowds.

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.

I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing.

Evil is movement towards void.

War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.