Don DeLillo Quotes

What is art? Art talks about life; it's subversive.

Art has to change things, and if it was immediately acceptable it would not be doing the job.

I think all good architecture should challenge you, make you start asking questions. You don't have to understand it. You may not like it. That's OK.

Artists are not cheerleaders, and we're not the heads of tourism boards. We expose and discuss what is problematic, what is contradictory, what is hurtful and what is silenced in the culture we're in.

People might say I'm difficult, but did you ever hear anyone describe a label as 'difficult'? By nature, artists should challenge. When they call you difficult, it is a reflection of the imbalance of power.

In school, I learned about artists and how they were free to express themselves. I was allergic to conformity, and the lifestyle attracted me. I wanted to express myself in a way that slammed people up against the wall.

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.

I think the job of artists is to stir things up.

It's a great place to be as an artist: if you confuse your label, you're doing your job.

I've always liked this idea that writing should comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable to create trouble. The value of a work of art can be measured by the harm spoken of it. If you're not feeling that, then absolutely, why bother?

Bohemia isn't somewhere an artist runs to escape society. It's a place where like-minded artists gather to plot the downfall of dogma and ignorance.

Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.

All artists are anarchists in some way - some more extreme than others, but it's something that I think artists are supposed to do. We're supposed to present a different angle on everything, and I certainly think it is [art] as much as poetry, in my opinion.

This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.

The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.

The writer who is a real writer is a rebel who never stops.

I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.

Wherever I see some mystique, be it virtue or family, faith or fatherland, there I must commit some indecent act.

That's the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?

What I love about comedians is their instinct is always to go against the grain. Their whole existence is pointing out the elephant in the room. Already you can see audiences are pushing back, but we're the ones who really can take it more than anybody.

What's the use of being a writer if you can't irritate a great many people?

I did go through a Goth thing, but that was a long time ago. I just like artists that shake it up, that piss people off or make people think or rattle the cage somehow.

Everything I've done hasn't worked out - you know, some things aren't as great as others - but I'm having so much fun, who cares? Isn't that what an artist is supposed to do? We're trying to change the world. Otherwise, why be an artist? You want to shake people up and make 'em think.

I don't mind being controversial. Even Jesus wasn't loved in his day.

It is an artist's duty to be on the wrong end of the see-saw.