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He Said, "the Word For Moonlight Is Moonlight.
-Don DeLillo
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He Said, "the Word

Don DeLillo
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He Said, "the Word For Moonlight Is Moonlight.

Understanding the Quote: "he said, "the word for moonlight is moonlight...."

This quote by Don DeLillo reflects deeply on the theme of moonlight. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Moonlight, Said, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Don DeLillo interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo is celebrated for insightful thoughts on moonlight and said. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Moonlight
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I Think Fiction Recues History From Its Confusions.
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Men With Secrets Tend To Be Drawn To Each Other, Not Because They Want To Share What They Know But Because They Need The Company Of The Like-minded, The Fellow Afflicted.
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One Connection I See Between Novelists And Terrorists Is That We Both Attempt To Alter Consciousness.
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A Dead Afternoon In A Dark Bar Was Not The Worst Of Fates.
Fate
Dark
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Your Brain Has A Trillion Neurons And Every Neuron Has Ten Thousand Little Dendrites. The System Of Inter-communication Is Awe-inspiring.
Communication
Brain
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That's Why People Take Vacations. No To Relax Or Find Excitement Or See New Places. To Escape The Death That Exists In Routine Things.
Vacation
People
Relax
Time Is A Corporate Asset Now. It Belongs To The Free Market System. The Present Is Harder To Find... The Future Becomes Insistent.
Assets
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Harder
Somehow Pictures Always Lead To People As Masses. Books Belong To Individuals.
Book
People
Individual
Explain Me To Myself, You’ll Make Me Choke On My Lunch. Feel Sympathy For Me, I’ll Puke Monkey Blood On Your Understated Shoes.
Blood
Shoes
Lunch
Evil Is Movement Towards Void.
Evil
Movement
Void
In These Night Recitations We Create A Space Between Things As We Felt Them At The Time And As We Speak Them Now. This Is The Space Reserved For Irony, Sympathy And Fond Amusement, The Means By Which We Rescue Ourselves From The Past.
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Everything I've Stated May Prove To Be Total Poppycock.... Perhaps Time Will Tell. Perhaps Time Will Do Nothing Of The Kind.
May
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The Difference Between The World Of Pictures And The World Of Printed Matter Is Extraordinary And Hard To Define. A Picture Is Like The Masses: A Multitude Of Impressions. A Book On The Other Hand, With Its Linear Advance Of Words And Characters Seems To Be Connected To Individual Identity.
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Hardship Makes The World Obscure.
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There Is No Lie In War Or Preparation Of War That Can't Be Defended.
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I Don’t Want Your Candor. I Want Your Soul In A Silver Thimble.
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My Attitudes Aren't Directed Toward Characters At All. I Don't Feel Sympathetic Toward Some Characters, Unsympathetic Toward Others. I Don't Love Some Characters, Feel Contempt For Others. They Have Attitudes; I Don't.
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Out Of Some Persistent Sense Of Large-scale Ruin, We Kept Inventing Hope.
Ruins
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The Instant He Knew He Loved Her, She Slipped Down His Body And Out Of His Arms
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I Understand There Are Some Men Who Are Only Half Here. Let's Not Say Men. Let's Say People. People Who Are More Or Less Obscure At Times.
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...because What's The Meaning Of Doing Dishes If You're Not Driven By Something Beyond Necessity.
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It Is All Falling Indelibly Into The Past.
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There Are Two Categories Of Writers, It Could Be Said: The Author Who Is Just A Voice, And The One Who Is Also Creating A Picture. I Belong To The Latter, Because I Have An Acute Visual Sense.
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The Less Important You Are In An Office, The More They Expect The Happy Smile.
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The Genius Of Rock Music Is That It Matched The Cultural Hysteria Around It.
Rocks
Hysteria
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The Writer Is The Person Who Stands Outside Society, Independent Of Affiliation And Independent Of Influence.
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Time Seems To Pass. The World Happens, Unrolling Into Moments, And You Stop To Glance At A Spider Pressed To Its Web. There Is A Quickness Of Light And A Sense Of Things Outlined Precisely And Streaks Of Running Luster On The Bay. You Know More Surely Who You Are On A Strong Bright Day After A Storm When The Smallest Falling Leaf Is Stabbed With Self-awareness. The Wind Makes A Sound In The Pines And The World Comes Into Being, Irreversibly, And The Spider Rides The Wind-swayed Web.
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There Is A World Inside The World.
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No Sense Of The Irony Of Human Experience, That We Are The Highest Form Of Life On Earth, And Yet Ineffably Sad Because We Know What No Other Animal Knows, That We Must Die.
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It Is So Much Simpler To Bury Reality Than It Is To Dispose Of Dreams
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The Less There Was To See, The Harder He Looked, The More He Saw. (point Omega)
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He'd Once Told Me That The Art Of Getting Ahead In New York Was Based On Learning How To Express Dissatisfaction In An Interesting Way. The Air Was Full Of Rage And Complaint. People Had No Tolerance For Your Particular Hardship Unless You Knew How To Entertain Them With It.
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What Terrorists Gain, Novelists Lose.
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If An Idea Seems To Find Its Way Towards A Stage Setting, That's The Direction I Take. I Don't Know If I'm Trying To Achieve Anything Other Than To Follow An Idea On To The Page.
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I Do Think That In The Near Future, If It Hasn't Happened Already, People Will Be Able To Use Technology To Design Their Own Novels, Perhaps With Individuals Themselves As The Main Character. In Other Words, Everything Is Being Individualized And Narrowed.
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Years After I'd Seen Him For The Last Time I Found Myself Thinking Of Him Unexpectedly And Often. You Know How Certain Places Grow Powerful In The Mind With Passing Time. In Those Early Morning Dreams When I Come Back To Bed After A Sleepy Pee And Fall Quickly Into The Narrow End Of The Night, There Is One Set Of Streets I Keep Returning To, One Dim Mist Of Railroad Rooms And Certain Figures Reappear, Borderline Ghosts.
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In My Experience, Writing A Novel Tends To Create Its Own Structure, Its Own Demands, Its Own Language, Its Own Ending.
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Stories Are Consoling, Fiction Is One Of The Consolation Prizes For Having Lived In The World.
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As Technology Advances In Complexity And Scope, Fear Becomes More Primitive.
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What Good Is Knowledge If It Just Floats In The Air? It Goes From Computer To Computer. It Changes And Grows Every Second Of Every Day. But Nobody Actually Knows Anything.
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Do People Still Shoot At Presidents? I Thought There Were More Stimulating Targets.' (20)
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Making Things Difficult For The Reader Is Less An Attack On The Reader Than It Is On The Age And Its Facile Knowledge-market.
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In A Repressive Society, A Writer Can Be Deeply Influential, But In A Society That's Filled With Glut And Repetition And Endless Consumption, The Act Of Terror May Be The Only Meaningful Act.
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May The Days Be Aimless. Do Not Advance Action According To A Plan.
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To Be A Tourist Is To Escape Accountability. Errors And Failings Don't Cling To You The Way They Do Back Home. You're Able To Drift Across Continents And Languages, Suspending The Operation Of Sound Thought. Tourism Is The March Of Stupidity.
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All Human Existence Is A Trick Of Light.
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The Figure Of The Gunman In The Window Was Inextricable From The Victim And His History. This Sustained Oswald In His Cell. It Gave Him What He Needed To Live. The More Time He Spent In A Cell, The Stronger He Would Get. Everybody Knew Who He Was Now.
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Digital Clocks Took The 'space' Out Of Time.
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Something Is Always Happening, Even On The Quietest Days And Deep Into The Night, If You Stand A While And Look.
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It Was The Time Of Year, The Time Of Day, For A Small Insistent Sadness To Pass Into The Texture Of Things. Dusk, Silence, Iron Chill. Something Lonely In The Bone.
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I Think Silence Is The Condition You Accept As The Judgment On Your Crimes.
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Doesn't Seem Quite Real. It's Not Meaningful. I Can't Quite Imagine Myself Being 73. That's The Age My Father Was! [laughter.] How Can I Be His Age? It's Weird.
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The Modern Meaning Of Life's End-when Does It End? How Does It End? How Should It End? What Is The Value Of Life? How Do We Measure It?
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It Is Interesting ... How Weapons Reflect The Soul Of The Maker.
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It Occurred To Me That Eating Is The Only Form Of Professionalism Most People Ever Attain.
People
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I Would Never Write In Response To What I Believe The Public Wanted Or Needed.
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We Don't Really Know How Technology Will Affect Narrative. That's The Question. See, People Used To Say That The Novel Is Going To Die, But They Would Never Say That Movies Will Die With It, When In Fact All Forms Depend On The Narrative. I Think If One Of Them Fails, The Others Are Going To Fail As Well. Maybe This Will Happen To Both Forms, And Maybe Movies Will Take A Totally Different Direction With Fiction.
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Thinking
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It's My Contention That Each Book Creates Its Own Structure And Its Own Length. I've Written Three Or Four Slim Books. It May Be That The Next Novel Is A Big One, But I Don't Know.
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If We Are On The Outside, We Assume A Conspiracy Is The Perfect Working Of A Scheme. Silent Nameless Men With Unadorned Hearts. A Conspiracy Is Everything That Ordinary Life Is Not. It's The Inside Game, Cold, Sure, Undistracted, Forever Closed Off To Us. We Are The Flawed Ones, The Innocents, Trying To Make Some Rough Sense Of The Daily Jostle. Conspirators Have A Logic And A Daring Beyond Our Reach. All Conspiracies Are The Same Taut Story Of Men Who Find Coherence In Some Criminal Act.
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I Felt Joyce Was An Influence On My Fiction, But In A Very General Way, As A Kind Of Inspiration And A Model For The Beauty Of Language.
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When He Died He Would Not End. The World Would End.
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Ends
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The Language Of My Books Has Shaped Me As A Man.
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Famous People Don't Want To Be Told That You Have A Quality In Common With Them. It Makes Them Think There's Something Crawling In Their Clothes.
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[i]n The American Soul There Is A Lonely Individual Standing In A Vast Landscape. 
he Is Either On A Horse Or Driving A Car, Depending, And Either Way He’s Carrying A Gun. 
this Is One Of The Essential Images In American Mythology.
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Gun
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Vision
Trying
Facts Are Lonely Things.
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First You Look For Discipline And Control. You Want To Exercise Your Will, Bend The Language Your Way, Bend The World Your Way. You Want To Control The Flow Of Impulses, Images, Words, Faces, Ideas. But There's A Higher Place, A Secret Aspiration. You Want To Let Go. You Want To Lose Yourself In Language, Become A Carrier Or Messenger.
Letting Go
Exercise
Ideas
I Embarked On My Life - I Didn't Do Anything. I Don't Have An Explanation.
Explanation
Certainly I've Never Tried To Imagine What The Future Will Hold. It's A Hopeless Endeavor To Try To Do Such A Thing.
Trying
Hopeless
Imagine
A Mystery Novel Localizes The Awesome Force Of The Real Death Outside The Book, Winds It Tightly In A Plot.
Real
Book
Wind
It's No Accident That My First Novel Was Called Americana. This Was A Private Declaration Of Independence, A Statement Of My Intention To Use The Whole Picture, The Whole Culture.
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Culture
Use
I've Got Death Inside Me. It's Just A Question Of Whether Or Not I Can Outlive It.
I Can
If You Reveal Everything, Bare Every Feeling, Ask For Understanding, You Lose Something Crucial To Your Sense Of Yourself. You Need To Know Things That Others Don't Know. It's What No One Knows About You That Allows You To Know Yourself.
Understanding
Feelings
Needs
To Portray America Over The Past Twenty Years Or So, I Would Think Immediately Of Football, Probably The Super Bowl In Its Sumptuous Suggestion Of A National Death Wish.
Football
Thinking
Past
The True Life Is Not Reducible To Words Spoken Or Written, Not By Anyone, Ever. The True Life Takes Place When We're Alone, Thinking, Feeling, Lost In Memory, Dreamingly Self-aware, The Submicroscopic Moments.
Life
Memories
Thinking
I Marched And I Protested Against The War In Vietnam, Along With Many, Many Thousands Of Others. But I Never Quite Understood The Bombs That Were Placed In Science Labs Or Office Buildings.
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Office
Vietnam
America Was And Is The Immigrant's Dream.
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America
Literature
To Be A Tourist Is To Escape Accountability.
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Tourists
If Any Art Form Can Accommodate Contemporary Culture, It's The Novel. It's So Malleable - It Can Incorporate Essays, Poetry, Film. Maybe The Challenge For The Novelist Is To Stretch His Art And His Language, To The Point Where It Can Finally Describe What's Happening Around Him.
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Challenges
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There Came A Time In Every Prolonged Effort When He Had A Moment Of Near Panic, Or 'terror In A Lonely Place', The Original Semantic Content Of The Word. The Lonely Place Was His Own Mind.
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Effort
Anxiety
Fear Is Unnatural. Lightning And Thunder Are Unnatural. Pain, Death, Reality, These Are All Unnatural. We Can't Bear These Things As They Are. We Know Too Much. So We Resort To Repression, Compromise And Disguise. This Is How We Survive The Universe. This Is The Natural Language Of The Species.
Pain
Reality
Lightning
There Is A Balance, A Kind Of Standoff Between The Time Continuum And The Human Entity, Our Frail Bundle Of Soma And Psyche. We Eventually Succumb To Time, It's True, But Time Depends On Us. We Carry It In Our Muscles And Genes, Pass It On To The Next Set Of Time-factoring Creatures, Our Brown-eyed Daughters And Jug-eared Sons, Or How Would The World Keep Going. Never Mind The Time Theorists, The Cesium Devices That Measure The Life And Death Of The Smallest Silvery Trillionth Of A Second.... We Were The Only Crucial Clocks, Our Minds And Bodies, Way Stations For The Distribution Of Time.
Daughter
Time
Son
Every Sentence Has A Truth Waiting At The End Of It And The Writer Learns How To Know It When He Finally Gets There.
Waiting
Literature
Ends
As Belief Shrinks From The World, It Is More Necessary Than Ever That Someone Believe. Wild-eyed Men In Caves. Nuns In Black. Monks Who Do Not Speak. We Are Left To Believe. Fools, Children. Those Who Have Abandoned Belief Must Still Believe In Us. They Are Sure They Are Right Not To Believe But They Know Belief Must Not Fade Completely. Hell Is When No One Believes.
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Believe
Men
You Need To Know Things The Others Don't Know. It's What No One Knows About You That Allows You To Know Yourself.
Needs
Know Thyself
Know Yourself
The Best Moments Involve A Loss Of Control. It's A Kind Of Rapture, And It Can Happen With Words And Phrases Fairly Often - Completely Surprising Combinations That Make A Higher Kind Of Sense, That Come To You Out Of Nowhere. But Rarely For Extended Periods, For Paragraphs And Pages - I Think Poets Must Have More Access To This State Than Novelists Do.
Loss
Thinking
Novelists
Why Shouldn't The Death Of A Person You Love Bring You Into Lurid Ruin? You Don't Know How To Love The One You Love Until They Disappear Abruptly. Then You Understand How Thinly Distanced From Their Suffering, How Sparing Of Self You Often Were, Only Rarely Unguarded Of Heart, Working Your Networks Of Give-and-take.
Heart
Self
Giving
She Became Confused When She Stepped Onto An Escalator That Wasn't Working.
Confused
Escalators
Writing Is A Form Of Personal Freedom. It Frees Us From The Mass Identity We See In The Making All Around Us. In The End, Writers Will Write Not To Be Outlaw Heroes Of Some Underculture But Mainly To Save Themselves, To Survive As Individuals.
Hero
Writing
Identity
Let's Enjoy The Aimless Days While We Still Can.
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Stills
Look Past The Violence. There Is A Wonderful Brimming Spirit Of Innocence And Fun.
Fun
Past
Looks
The Writer Is Driven By His Conviction That Some Truths Aren't Arrived At So Easily, That Life Is Still Full Of Mystery, That It Might Be Better For You, Dear Reader, If You Went Back To The Living Section Of Your Newspaper Because This Is The Dying Section And You Don't Really Want To Be Here.
Dying
Want
Might
That's How You Write Novels Actually. You Suddenly Hit Upon Something And You Realize This Is The Path You Were Meant To Take. You'd Be A Fool If You Didn't Follow It. Perhaps It's Like Solving A Difficult Question In Pure Mathematics. There Must Be A Moment When The Solution Is So Simple And Evident That You Wonder Why You Hadn't Come Upon It Before. When You Do Come Upon It, You Know It In The Deepest Part Of Your Being. It Carries Its Own Logic.
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A Person Rises On A Word And Falls On A Syllable.
Fall
Persons
Syllables
The Term Itself--my Life--is A Desperate Overstatement.
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The Greater The Scientific Advance, The More Primitive The Fear.
White Noise
Primitive
Greater
Tourism Is The March Of Stupidity.
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Tourism
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Cells
Brain
Prayer Is A Practical Strategy, The Gaining Of Temporal Advantage In The Capital Markets Of Sin And Remission.
Prayer
Sin
Strategy
Terror Is Now The World Narrative, Unquestionably. When Those Two Buildings Were Struck, And When They Collapsed, It Was, In Effect, An Extraordinary Blow To Consciousness, And It Changed Everything.
Blow
Two
World
What Did It Mean, The First Time, A Thinking Creature Looked Deeply Into Another's Eyes? Did It Take A Hundred Thousand Years Before This Happened Or It Was The First Thing They Did, Transcendingly, The Thing That Made Them Higher, Made Them Modern, The Gaze That Demonstrates We Are Lonely In Our Souls?
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Eye
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People Had No Tolerance For Your Particular Hardship Unless You Knew How To Entertain Them With It.
People
Tolerance
Hardship
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.
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Book
Men
They Passed Out Of The Shade Beneath The Eaves And Flew Into Sunglare And Silence And It Was An Action She Only Partly Saw, Elusive And Mutely Beautiful, The Birds So Sunstruck They Were Consumed By Light, Disembodied, Turned Into Something Sheer And Fleet And Scatter-bright.
Beautiful
Light
Silence
America Can Be Saved Only By What It's Trying To Destroy.
America
Trying
Saved
Murray Said, ´i Don´t Trust Anybody´s Nostalgia But My Own. Nostalgia Is A Product Of Dissatisfaction And Rage. It´s A Settling Of Grievances Between The Present And The Past. The More Powerful The Nostalgia, The Closer You Come To Violence. War Is The Form Nostalgia Takes When Men Are Hard-pressed To Say Something Good About Their Country.´
Country
Powerful
War
I Think More Than Writers, The Major Influences On Me Have Been European Movies, Jazz, And Abstract Expressionism.
Thinking
Jazz
Influence
I See Contemporary Violence As A Kind Of Sardonic Response To The Promise Of Consumer Fulfilment In America.
America
Promise
Violence
Longing On A Large Scale Makes History.
Longing
Scales
Large Scale
People Think About Who They Are In The Stillest Hour Of The Night. I Carry This Thought, The Child's Mystery And Terror Of This Thought, I Feel This Immensity In My Soul Every Second Of My Life.
Children
Night
Thinking
Fame And Secrecy Are The High And Low Ends Of The Same Fascination.
Fascination
Fame
Secrecy
People Stress The Violence. That's The Smallest Part Of It. Football Is Brutal Only From A Distance. In The Middle Of It There's A Calm, A Tranquility. The Players Accept Pain. There's A Sense Of Order Even At The End Of A Running Play With Bodies Strewn Everywhere. When The Systems Interlock, There's A Satisfaction To The Game That Can't Be Duplicated. There's A Harmony.
Football
Running
Pain
If The World Is Where We Hide From Ourselves, What Do We Do When The World Is No Longer Accessible? We Invent A False Name, Invent A Destiny, Purchase A Firearm Through The Mail.
Destiny
Names
World
Writing Is A Concentrated Form Of Thinking.
Writing
Thinking
Form
It's All About Time, Dimwit Time, Inferior Time, People Checking Watches And Other Devices, Other Reminders. This Is Time Draining Out Of Our Lives. Cities Were Built To Measure Time, To Remove Time From Nature. There's An Endless Counting Down, He Said. When You Strip Away Surfaces, When You See Into It, What's Left Is Terror. This Is The Thing That Literature Was Meant To Cure. The Epic Poem, The Bedtime Story.
Epic
Cities
People
People Think About Who They Are In The Stillest Hour Of The Night.
Night
Thinking
People
Isn't Death The Boundary We Need? Doesn't It Give A Precious Texture To Life, A Sense Of Definition? You Have To Ask Yourself Whether Anything You Do In This Life Would Have Beauty And Meaning Without The Knowledge You Carry Of A Final Line, A Border Or Limit.
Giving
Borders
Finals
In This Century The Writer Has Carried On A Conversation With Madness. We Might Almost Say Of The Twentieth-century Writer That He Aspires To Madness. Some Have Made It, Of Course, And They Hold Special Places In Our Regard. To A Writer, Madness Is A Final Distillation Of Self, A Final Editing Down. It's The Drowning Out Of False Voices.
Editing
Self
Voice
How Strange It Is. We Have These Deep Terrible Lingering Fears About Ourselves And The People We Love. Yet We Walk Around, Talk To People, Eat And Drink. We Manage To Function. The Feelings Are Deep And Real. Shouldn't They Paralyze Us? How Is It We Can Survive Them, At Least For A Little While? We Drive A Car, We Teach A Class. How Is It No One Sees How Deeply Afraid We Were, Last Night, This Morning? Is It Something We All Hide From Each Other, By Mutual Consent? Or Do We Share The Same Secret Without Knowing It? Wear The Same Disguise?
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Real
Night
Never Underestimate The Power Of The State To Act Out Its Own Massive Fantasies.
Literature
Fantasy
Underestimate
Music Is Dangerous In So Many Ways. It's The Most Dangerous Thing In The World.
World
Way
Dangerous
In This Country There Is A Universal Third Person, The Man We All Want To Be. Advertising Has Discovered This Man. It Uses Him To Express The Possibilities Open To The Consumer. To Consume In America Is Not To Buy; It Is To Dream. Advertising Is The Suggestion That The Dream Of Entering The Third Person Singular Might Possibly Be Fulfilled.
Dream
Country
Men
Say Heat. Say Wet Between My Legs. Say Legs. Seriously, I Want You To. Stockings. Whisper It. The Word Is Meant To Be Whispered.
Legs
Want
Heat
Fear Is Self-awareness Raised To A Higher Level.
Fear
Self
Levels
These Are The Days After. Everything Now Is Measured By After.
Words Are Not Necessary To One's Experience Of The True Life.
True Life
Freud Is Finished, Einstein's Next.
Next
Finished
You Become A Serious Novelist By Living Long Enough.
Writing
Long
Novelists
Dying Was Just An Extended Version Of Ash Wednesday.
Death
Dying
Ashes
Sitting For A Picture Is Morbid Business. A Portrait Doesn't Begin To Mean Anything Until The Subject Is Dead. This Is The Whole Point. We're Doing This To Create A Kind Of Sentimental Past For People In Decades To Come. It's Their Past, Their History We're Inventing Here. And It's Not How I Look Now That Matters. It's How I'll Look In Twenty-five Years As Clothing And Faces Change, As Photographs Change. The Deeper I Pass Into Death, The More Powerful My Picture Becomes. Isn't This Why Picture-taking Is So Ceremonial? It's Like A Wake. And I'm The Actor Made Up For The Laying-out.
Powerful
Mean
Past
Writers, Some Of Us, May Tend To See Things Before Other People Do, Things That Are Right There But Aren't Noticed In The Way That A Writer Might Notice.
People
May
Might
Look At Those Numbers Running. Money Makes Time. It Used To Be The Other Way Around. Clock Time Accelerated The Rise Of Capitalism. People Stopped Thinking About Eternity. They Began To Concentrate On Hours, Measurable Hours,man-hours, Using Labor More Efficiently.
Running
Men
Thinking
Nostalgia Is A Product Of Dissatisfaction And Rage. It´s A Settling Of Grievances Between The Present And The Past.
Past
Nostalgia
Rage
Sometimes I See Something So Moving I Know I’m Not Supposed To Linger. See It And Leave. If You Stay Too Long, You Wear Out The Wordless Shock. Love It And Trust It And Leave.
Moving
Long
Sometimes
I Think There Is A Sense Of Last Things In My Work That Probably Comes From A Catholic Childhood.
Thinking
Childhood
Catholic
Technology Is Lust Removed From Nature.
Technology
Lust
I Watch Movies Occasionally, And I Watch Documentaries. Virtually Nothing Else.
Watches
Documentaries
Watch Movie
People Who Are Powerless Make An Open Theater Of Violence.
Power
People
Literature
People Who Are In Power Make Their Arrangements In Secret, Largely As A Way Of Maintaining And Furthering That Power.
Power
People
Secret Love
Some People Are Larger Than Life. Hitler Is Larger Than Death.
People
Larger Than Life
Even When You Self-destruct, You Want To Fail More, Lose More, Die More Than Others, Stink More Than Others.
Self
Want
Failing
The Question Of Dying Becomes A Wise Reminder. It Cures Us Of Our Innocence Of The Future.
Wise
Dying
Innocence
If I Were A Writer, How I Would Enjoy Being Told The Novel Is Dead. How Liberating To Work In The Margins, Outside A Central Perception. You Are The Ghoul Of Literature. Lovely.
Love
Ghouls
Perception
I Slept For Four Years. I Didn't Study Much Of Anything. I Majored In Something Called Communication Arts.
Art
Communication
Reality
I'm A Novelist, Period. An American Novelist.
Novelists
Periods
We Commit Our Crimes At Night And Reveal Ourselves In The High Noon Of Studio Lights.
Night
Light
Noon
We Seem To Believe It Is Possible To Ward Off Death By Following Rules Of Good Grooming.
Believe
Following Rules
Grooming
There's A Curious Knot That Binds Novelists And Terrorists...years Ago I Used To Think It Was Possible For A Novelist To Alter The Inner Life Of The Culture. Now Bomb-makers And Gunmen Have Taken That Territory. They Make Raids On Human Consciousness. What Writers Used To Do Before We Were All Incorporated.
Taken
Thinking
Years
Fame Requires Every Kind Of Excess. I Mean True Fame, A Devouring Neon, Not The Sombre Renown Of Waning Statesmen Or Chinless Kings.
Kings
Mean
Excess
I Saw A Photograph Of A Wedding Conducted By Reverend Moon Of The Unification Church. I Wanted To Understand This Event, And The Only Way To Understand It Was To Write About It.
Photography
Wedding
Writing
There's Never A Dearth Of Reasons To Shoot At The President.
President
Reason
It Frequently Happens That I Begin A Novel With Just A Visual Image Of Something, A Vague Sense Of People In Three Dimensional Space.
Space
People
Three
You Have To Break Through The Structure Of Your Own Stonework Habit Just To Make Yourself Listen.
Break Through
Habit
Break
He Said, "the Word For Moonlight Is Moonlight.
Moonlight
Said
Coming And Going I Am Leaving. I Will Go And Come. Leaving Has Come To Me. We All, Shall All, Will All Be Left. Because I Am Here And Where. And I Will Go Or Not Or Never. And I Have Seen What I Will See. If I Am Where I Will Be. Because Nothing Comes Between Me.
Leaving
Left
Ifs
At Night The Sky Was Very Near, Sprawled In Star Smoke And Gamma Cataclysms, But She Didn't See It The Way She Used To, As Soul Extension, Dumb Guttural Wonder, A Thing That Lived Outside Language In The Oldest Part Of Her.
Stars
Night
Sky
Why Are Homosexuals Addicted To Soap Opera? Because Our Lives Are A Vivid Situation.
Opera
Vivid
Soap
To Plot Is To Live. […] We Start Out Lives In Chaos, In Babble. As We Surge Up Into The World, We Try To Devise A Shape, A Plan. There Is Dignity In This. Your Whole Life Is A Plot, A Scheme, A Diagram. It Is A Failed Scheme But That's Not The Point. To Plot Is To Affirm Life, To Seek Shape And Control. Even After Death, Most Particularly After Death, The Search Continues. Burial Rites Are An Attempt To Complete The Scheme, In Ritual. Picture A State Funeral, Jack. It Is All Precision, Detail, Order, Design. The Nation Holds Its Breath. - (wn 292)
Order
Design
Funeral
A Shrewd Person Would One Day Start A Religion Based On Coincidence, If He Hasn't Already, And Make A Million.
One Day
Coincidence
Persons
And What's The Point Of Waking Up In The Morning If You Don't Try To Match The Enormousness Of The Known Forces In The World With Something Powerful In Your Own Life?
Morning
Powerful
Trying
I've Always Liked Being Relatively Obscure. I Feel That's Where I Belong, That's Where My Work Belongs.
Literature
Obscure
Feels
America Is The World's Living Myth. There's No Sense Of Wrong When You Kill An American Or Blame America For Some Local Disaster. This Is Our Function, To Be Character Types, To Embody Recurring Themes That People Can Use To Comfort Themselves, Justify Themselves And So On. We're Here To Accommodate. Whatever People Need, We Provide. A Myth Is A Useful Thing.
Character
America
People
When I Read Obituaries I Always Note The Age Of The Deceased. Automatically I Relate This Figure To My Own Age. Four Years To Go, I Think. Nine More Years. Two Years And I'm Dead. The Power Of Numbers Is Never More Evident Than When We Use Them To Speculate On The Time Of Our Dying.
Death
Thinking
Years
Only A Catastrophe Gets Our Attention. We Want Them, We Depend On Them. As Long As They Happen Somewhere Else. This Is Where California Comes In. Mud Slides, Brush Fires, Coastal Erosion, Mass Killings, Et Cetera. We Can Relax And Enjoy These Disasters Because In Our Hearts We Feel That California Deserves Whatever It Gets. Californians Invented The Concept Of Life-style. This Alone Warrants Their Doom.
Heart
Fire
Erosion
I Like The Construction Of Sentences And The Juxtaposition Of Words-not Just How They Sound Or What They Mean, But Even What They Look Like.
Mean
Sound
Looks
I Was Always Younger Than Anyone Around Me. One Day It Began To Change.
One Day
Everything's A Scandal. Dying's A Scandal. But We All Do It.
Dying
Scandal
Talent Is More Erotic When It's Wasted.
Erotic
Talent
Her Death Would Leave Me Scattered, Talking To Chairs And Pillows. Don't Let Us Die, I Want To Cry Out To That Fifth-century Sky Ablaze With Mystery And Spiral Light. Let Us Both Live Forever, In Sickness And Health, Feebleminded, Doddering, Toothless, Liver-spotted, Dim-sighted, Hallucinating. Who Decides These Things? What Is Out There? Who Are You?
Light
Talking
Sky
The Shock, The Power Of An Ordinary Life. It Is A Thing You Could Not Invent With Banks Of Computers In A Dust-free Room.
Life
Dust
Ordinary
The Smoke Alarm Went Off In The Hallway Upstairs, Either To Let Us Know The Battery Had Just Died Or Because The House Was On Fire.
Fire
House
Alarms
I've Come To Think Of Europe As A Hardcover Book, America As The Paperback Version.
Book
Thinking
Europe
What We Are Reluctant To Touch Often Seems The Very Fabric Of Our Salvation.
Fabric
Salvation
Seems
Insanity's So Personal. It's Hard To Know Who Shares Our Secrets.
Insanity
Secret
Share
You Shout Because It Makes You Brave Or You Want To Announce Your Recklessness.
Courage
Brave
Want
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