Don DeLillo Quotes

Writing can't change the world overnight, but writing may have an enormous effect over time, over the long haul.

The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

Power, for the writer, lies in his ability to reveal …

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

There is more done with pens than with swords.

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake.

If the motive of writing is for some people a kind of exercise in dirty laundry, that's one thing. I've always thought of my poems as meant to be overheard, as I think all of these poems are. It seems to me if you get experience right, even your most painful or humiliating experiences - if you get those experiences right for yourself and make discoveries as you go along and find for them some formal glue - they will be poems for others.

I saw what could be done with words, for I had a vision of a new world as I talked.

Poets can tell the truth as they see it. It’s the author’s story, the author’s voice.

I put a lot of work into my lyrics. Not all my stuff is meant to be scrutinized, though.

It seems to me that before the photograph can exist as art it must, by its very nature choose whether it is to be a record or a testimony.

I can speak of my own criterion for judging whether or not a book is good or bad. I ask of it a single question, From how deep and true an impulse did it spring? Was it written merely to shock? Only to make money? Or was it written to create something more perfect and more lasting than the life experience from which it came?

One reason writers write is out of revenge.

I think I have to be aware of how much power words can have. And it makes me consider everything that I say before I say it, because you can really help a lot of people, or you can really, really mess things up.

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

Only well-written works will descend to posterity. Fulness of knowledge, interesting facts, even useful inventions, are no pledge of immortality, for they may be employed by more skilful hands; they are outside the man; the style is the man himself.

I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.

My definition of poetry (if I were forced to give one) would be this: words that have become deeds.

You're charging money to have people come watch you play; I want them to feel taken someplace good or provoked into thinking my way for an hour and a half or two hours.

I should say that I'm not conscious of any particular style or any particular literary device when I am writing. I have written 22 books, and they are all very different. I have tried all kinds of genres.

It seems like the big difference between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art's heart's purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It's got something to do with love, with having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.

One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.

My paintings are not meant to be tasted.

Poetry is a solitary process. One does not write poetry for the masses. Poetry is a self-involved, lofty pursuit. Songs are for the people. When I'm writing a song, I imagine performing it. I imagine giving it. It's a different aspect of communication. It's for the people.