Don DeLillo Quote
These are among the people I've tried to know twice, the second time in memory and language. Through them, myself. They are what I've become, in ways I don't understand but which I believe will accrue to a rounded truth, a second life for me as well as them.Cracking jokes in the mandatory American manner of people self-concious about death. This is the humor of violent surprise.How do you connect things? Learn their names.It was a strange conversation, full of hedged remarks and obscure undercurrents, perfect in its way.I was not a happy runner. I did it to stay interested in my body, to stay informed, and to set up clear lines of endeavor, a standard to meet, a limit to stay within. I was just enough of a puritan to think there must be some virtue in rigorous things, although I was careful not to overdo it.I never wore the clothes. the shorts, tank top, high socks. Just running shoes and a lightweight shirt and jeans. I ran disguised as an ordinary person.-When are you two going to have children?-We're our own children.In novels lately the only real love, the unconditional love I ever come across is what people feel for animals. Dolphins, bears, wolves, canaries.I would avoid people, stop drinking.There was a beggar with a Panasonic.This is what love comes down to, things that happen and what we say about them.But nothing mattered so much on this second reading as a number of spirited misspellings. I found these mangled words exhilarating. He'd made them new again, made me see how they worked, what they really were. They were ancient things, secret, reshapable.The only safety is in details.Hardship makes the world obscure.How else could men love themselves but in memory, knowing what they know?The world has become self-referring. You know this. This thing has seeped into the texture of the world. The world for thousands of years was our escape, was our refuge. Men hid from themselves in the world. We hid from God or death. The world was where we lived, the self was where we went mad and died. But now the world has made a self of its own.
These are among the people I've tried to know twice, the second time in memory and language. Through them, myself. They are what I've become, in ways I don't understand but which I believe will accrue to a rounded truth, a second life for me as well as them.Cracking jokes in the mandatory American manner of people self-concious about death. This is the humor of violent surprise.How do you connect things? Learn their names.It was a strange conversation, full of hedged remarks and obscure undercurrents, perfect in its way.I was not a happy runner. I did it to stay interested in my body, to stay informed, and to set up clear lines of endeavor, a standard to meet, a limit to stay within. I was just enough of a puritan to think there must be some virtue in rigorous things, although I was careful not to overdo it.I never wore the clothes. the shorts, tank top, high socks. Just running shoes and a lightweight shirt and jeans. I ran disguised as an ordinary person.-When are you two going to have children?-We're our own children.In novels lately the only real love, the unconditional love I ever come across is what people feel for animals. Dolphins, bears, wolves, canaries.I would avoid people, stop drinking.There was a beggar with a Panasonic.This is what love comes down to, things that happen and what we say about them.But nothing mattered so much on this second reading as a number of spirited misspellings. I found these mangled words exhilarating. He'd made them new again, made me see how they worked, what they really were. They were ancient things, secret, reshapable.The only safety is in details.Hardship makes the world obscure.How else could men love themselves but in memory, knowing what they know?The world has become self-referring. You know this. This thing has seeped into the texture of the world. The world for thousands of years was our escape, was our refuge. Men hid from themselves in the world. We hid from God or death. The world was where we lived, the self was where we went mad and died. But now the world has made a self of its own.
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About Don DeLillo
DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet. He was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
DeLillo has described his themes as "living in dangerous times" and "the inner life of the culture". In a 2005 interview, he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."