Don DeLillo Quotes

I'm sure I will cause tremendous seismic shifts in the culture again.

You must continue. Poets are the ones who change the world.

I came into public life during the 1960s when a whole bunch of us believed in our ability to change the world. And we did a lot of things.

It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.

I'm guessing that musicals didn't make sense anymore because of the changes in the political environment that began in the late Sixties, an era of self-awareness and social revolutions.

We are smart and powerful enough to change our world as we need.

The Sixties was a perfect storm of disaffection with political leaders trying to pass off the same old platitudes to maintain the status quo and an unexpected courageousness in the masses of youth. Nothing on this scale had ever happened before in U.S. history and it hasn't happened since.

Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.

I never wanted to be a professional artist; I think that's limiting.

Change the world is maybe Obama's job.

Rock-and-roll was an example of change in the body of the culture. I think it's really what helped bring the anti-war movement to its peak and moved people into the streets to seize the day - the movement was the embodiment of what was happening in the music. This is what taught me that it was possible to bring art and activism together. Without that piece, that energetic embodiment piece, the rest is just intellectual construct.

If you kept changing the way people saw the world, you ended up changing the way you saw yourself.

Be sure that you make a difference in the world.

To change the world you'll need a pen.

Changing how we see images is clearly one way to change the world.

Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.

I am not sure how a novel changes the world. I think it alters a reader's perspective by asking him or her to see the world through another consciousness. That can perhaps cause people to see their own lives differently. Or just give a single day, a single moment, a slightly different sheen.

I'm not 'Blockbuster Boy.' I never wanted to be. I wasn't looking for that.

There is very little point in trying to urge the world to mend its ways as long as that world is still convinced that its ways are perfectly adequate.

I'm talking about the '60s really. People go interview these guys and ask them, "Do you still think music can change the world?" I mean, go talk to Graham Nash about that. What's he going to tell you? Ask David Crosby. These guys are still out there. They're playing their hits at Staples Center and those are really valuable songs. I'm talking about a couple of the guys who got knee-deep into really believing music had a great service beyond radio. I believe it did. And I think a lot of those songs are great.

I don't think that Women's Liberation will change much though -- not because there is anything wrong with their aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women's Liberation will look very small and quaint.

When I went to school, it was right after the '60s and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in.... The idealistic wind of the '60s was still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that engrained in them forever.

Authority and example lead the world.

Naturally a direct comparison of terrorist and novelist is complete nonsense. But there was once a time when the novelist also had some influence on how his contemporaries thought, the way they saw the world, the way they lived.

The '70s were full of creativity. Everybody was so unique. It was a very creative period, and I think to be a designer you have to know a little about art and literature and music because there is inspiration in all of these things. You're looking for beauty but also something that makes sense.