Don DeLillo Quotes

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

I try to find the picture, not create it.

What you see is what you see.

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.

The point of departure must always be a vision of the truth. The eye is the route of the soul, and the pencil or brush must sincerely and naïvely reproduce what it sees.

The most pleasurable thing in the world, for me, is to see something and then translate how I see it.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

The world you see is less of an indication about the world and more of an indication about your seeing.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness. If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

There is creation in the eye.

Science has to do with facts, art with phenomena. To science, phenomena are of use only as they lead to facts; and to art, facts are of use only as they lead to phenomena.

Reality' is a word with many meanings.

To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

My films are like clouds: their meaning keeps changing every minute.

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

The perception of the audience is the interesting part. If the audience doesn't hear what is going on, is it going on or not?

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.

Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.