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.”

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

“There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.”

“There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.”

“The future belongs to crowds.”

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

“I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.”

“People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.”

“People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.”

“Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.”

“In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.”

“The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.”

“In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.”

“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.”