Don DeLillo Quotes

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.

I'm always telling myself as I write that I'm not really writing a novel; I'm just going to fool around with a character or an idea.

I have the loftiest idea, and the most passionate one, of art. Much too lofty to agree to subject it to anything. Much too passionate to want to divorce it from anything.

Art requires, above all things, a suppression of self, a subordination of one's self to an idea.

When people asked to buy my work I always said no. I'd had this rather rarefied idea that I didn't want money going through my head while I was making work. But after the car crash I realized that none of my work was owned by anyone. After that, I grew up a bit.

The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.

The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.

I don’t need the money. I don’t care if I make a dime on this. Let me make a good record.

The theater has to impose itself on the public, and not the public on the theater... The word "Art" should be written everywhere, in the auditorium and in the dressing rooms, before the word "Business" gets written there.

I don't ever try to anticipate my audience. I just write the songs I want to write, and hope people like 'em.

Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect.

Writing is too hard not to do exactly what you want to do. It's a very draining and agonizing process for me, and I don't want to live with any piece of work that I don't believe in completely. I have to believe completely in what I'm doing. It has grown organically out of my own experience.

Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.

it's difficult in Hollywood to be allowed to try anything. It's all a terrible compromise. There is no time for art. All that matters is what they call box office.

I think, as the writer, you're always going to mourn something [left out of a film]. But you also just want to know there's a good reason for it being left out. On the whole, you want to give something to somebody creative. The worst thing you can do is say, "Here, be creative, but do it like I want you to do it." I was always very mindful of that.

There's nothing as perfect as the initial idea. And the only reason I write and direct is to protect the writing, because that's what's most precious.

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

When I sit down to write a book, I don't ask myself, "How many am I going to sell?"

I can't do movies where you start thinking "Where's the commercial appeal? How are we going to market this?" It's not that kind of party.

You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art.

The precision of hisskill places his work beyond the tentative and the experimental stage. He is continually searching and exploring both himself and his surroundings. and in this exploration of the realm of places, people and things, contrasts and relationships, Callahan is no respecter of conventional technical formula or code. His delicate sense of pattern is an integral part of his photography and not a thing by itself.

To be able to translate the customs, ideas and appearance of my times as I see them - in a word, to create a living art - this has been my aim.

Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.

Artists are not your art monkeys. They are your collaborators. They should be given all due consideration to follow their journey.

I don't want to move over to Beverly Hills. My goal is to make the movies I want to make and support the people I want to support. That's it.