Don DeLillo Quotes

I write to make sense of things that don't make sense to me.

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, so they use them with care, with thought, with delight.

Words build bridges into unexplored regions.

For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.

I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within.

The nice thing about being a writer is that you can make magic happen without learning tricks.

As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

There are a few really fantastic stories left, and that kind of gives you some inspiration to find even new ones.

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.

Time discovers truth.

I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

I love writing different things.

As a journalist for 35 years, and now author for 20, I've learned that there's always more.

What writing does is to reveal.

You're right on the money with that. We're all like detectives in life. There's something at the end of the trail that we're all looking for.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.

I'm on a search for the truth.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

If you're a writer, you know there are ways in which we don't know what we're doing at all. We're working out mysteries in a sort of poetic realm, and hoping that if a story is honest, if you're dragging the deep truth out of yourself, then something good and profound might come out of it.

A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.