Don DeLillo Quotes

Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images to achieve changes in consciousness

I'm putting my consciousness towards trying to teach people through pictures and sculptures that there's something better in the world. That's what the world needs more of.

We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

Art's a very metaphysical activity. It's something that enriches the parameters of your life, the possibilities of being, and you touch transcendence and you change your life. And you want to change the life of others, too. That's why people are involved with art.

A human being is not a machine. Especially when it comes to creating.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

A playwright can drop a little acid in the water and it washes away a lot of rust.

I think, in the West, we often discount the arts as nice but not that important. Certainly in America when we cut funding for schools, the arts are the first programs to go. But the arts built the things we need more than anything else: collaboration and co-operation and creativity.

The arts are what humanize science and history.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

I watched a lot of avant-garde films, like Maya Deren's work, and I love film's technical ability to do things that are impossible in real life. It's related to the way collage allows you to manipulate reality and the hierarchies that are inherent in our awful but amazing world.

Use your imaginations, and use your empathy. If you don't do that, you're limiting yourself as an artist, and you're hurting the world.

I get a lot of energy from making things up, which is why I feel I'm a novelist.

The importance of creativity in our country is greatly misunderstood.

They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'

Art is the expression of imagination, not the reproduction of reality.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

An artist paints, dances, draws, writes, designs, or acts at the expanding edge of consciousness. We press into the unknown rather than the known. This makes life lovely and lively.

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.

What is wonderful about my art is that dream and reality can become one. There is just one step between the two.

Sure, go ahead, simulate life, using only ink and paper.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.