Don DeLillo Quotes

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

'Last Resort,' to me, is very much about finding truth and integrity in an extraordinary situation.

If I ever wrote a book, people would never believe it.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

When I saw corruption, I was forced to find truth on my own. I couldn't swallow the hypocrisy.

I feel some need to represent where I'm from. But ultimately, I think my only real responsibility is to - as much as possible - interrogate my own truths. This is to say not merely writing what I think is true, but using the writing to turn that alleged truth over and over, to stress-test it, in the aim of producing something readable.

It is a principle innate and co-natural to every man to have an insatiable inclination to the truth, and to seek for it as for hidden treasure

The compelling drive to get at the truth is what improves us all as psychologists and is part and parcel of intellectual integrity. But I do urge that we not let the drive for honesty put blinders on us and cut off our range of vision so that we miss the very thing we set out the understand - namely, the living human being.

I have always been more of a truth-seeking person since I was quite young.

You still had to find the music inside your language. You know, it was - that's a big part of what sort of moved me to begin writing the book. I wrote a little essay and I felt, yeah, this is a good voice. This is a good feeling. It feels like me.

I did not always know I would be a writer. Until I had a room of my own, I did not write much at all - no more than any other child who read a lot of books. I began to write fiction and poetry when I first had a room that was truly my own with a door that shut and some measure, however fragile, of privacy.

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

I was 45 when I wrote most of this book [Hungry Heart ], at what felt like a halfway point in my life, and I thought, If I can't be honest now, when will it happen? It was so hard to step away from the [protection of] fiction, but I'm ready to talk start telling their truth.

The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words.

When she came to write her story, she would wonder when the books and the words started to mean not just something, but everything.

I think it's more important to seek the truth than to try and be perfect, to be honest.

It's good to try stuff. I wrote a book that I threw away, and I think I just wrote it so I could try stuff in it and not be scared

I never thought I could write this much and now that it's coming to an end, I feel sad that I have to stop, sort of the way you feel at the end of a really good book and you know you're going to miss the main character. But in this case, the main character is me! Myself. Joe (formerly JoDan) Bunch. —Joe Bunch

Writing is my shelter. I don't hide behind the words; I use them to dig inside my heart to find the truth.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become.

You get caught up in a cycle at some point, so I broke the cycle and decided; I'm going to really write a lot of books, because I need to get in touch with that part of myself in order to make more music.

Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know; I've done it myself.

Imaginative writing has always been a solitary and indeed a somewhat antisocial activity. Apprenticeship existed, no doubt, but it was an apprenticeship to books and not to living masters of the craft.