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The Music I Like Best Is Kind Of Frozen In My Mind From The Sixties And Seventies. I Still Listen To The Same Jazz Music I Listened To When I Was Eighteen Years Old, And Like And Admire It Just As Much.

-Don DeLillo

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The Music I Like

Don DeLillo

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The Music I Like Best Is Kind Of Frozen In My Mind From The Sixties And Seventies. I Still Listen To The Same Jazz Music I Listened To When I Was Eighteen Years Old, And Like And Admire It Just As Much.

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More From Don DeLillo

Not Long Ago, A Novelist Could Believe He Could Have An Effect On Our Consciousness Of Terror. Today, The Men Who Shape And Inflence Human Consciousness Are The Terrorists.

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.

Difficult Questions

A Catholic Is Raised With The Idea That He Will Die Any Minute Now And If He Doesn't Live His Life In A Certain Way, This Death Is An Introduction To An Eternity Of Pain.

Any Assault On The Borders Of Perception Is Going To Seem Rash At First.

I've Got Death Inside Me. It's Just A Question Of Whether Or Not I Can Outlive It.

Facts Are Lonely Things.

A Dead Afternoon In A Dark Bar Was Not The Worst Of Fates.

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.

Longing On A Large Scale Makes History.

The True Life Is Not Reducible To Words Spoken Or Written, Not By Anyone, Ever.

People Say Great Art Is Immortal. I Say There's Something Mortal In It. It Carries A Glimpse Of Death.

For Me, Wellbehaved Books With Neat Plots And Worked-out Endings Seem Somewhat Quaint In The Face Of The Largely Incoherent Reality Of Modern Life; And Then Again Fiction, At Least As I Write It And Think Of It, Is A Kind Of Religious Meditation In Which Language Is The Final Enlightenment, And It Is Language, In Its Beauty, Its Ambiguity And Its Shifting Textures, That Drives My Work.

The Family Is The Cradle Of The World's Misinformation.

We Need Time To Lose Interest In Things.

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.

These Are The Days After. Everything Now Is Measured By After.

The Future Belongs To Crowds.

If You Know You're Worth Nothing, Only A Gamble With Death Can Gratify Your Vanity.

Just Because It's On The Radio Doesn't Mean We Have To Suspend Belief In The Evidence Of Our Senses.

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.

Talent Is More Erotic When It's Wasted.

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.

To Be A Tourist Is To Escape Accountability.

Plot A Murder, You're Saying. But Every Plot Is A Murder In Effect. To Plot Is To Die, Whether We Know It Or Not.

I Think A Playwright Realizes After He Finishes Working On The Script That This Is Only The Beginning. What Will Happen When It Moves Into Three Dimensions?

Why Is It So Hard To Be Serious, So Easy To Be Too Serious?

Isn't Death The Boundary We Need?

The World Is Full Of Abandoned Meanings. In The Commonplace I Find Unexpected Themes And Intensities.

I Never Wanted To Change The World. Norman Mailer Wanted To, He Set Himself The Task Of Changing The Consciousness Of Our Age. And I Think He Came Pretty Close, In The 1960s, To Actually Managing To Do It. But Me? No, No, I Never Wanted Anything Like That. I'm Not Maileresque.

Changing The World

I Am Not Comfortable With Abstract Writing, Stories That Look Like Essays: You Have To See, I Need To See.

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?

Meaning Of Life

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.

Technology And Violence Are Interdependent.

Dying Was Just An Extended Version Of Ash Wednesday.

I'm Very Concerned With Questions Of Language. This Is What I Think Of When I Think Of Myself As A Writer: I'm Someone Who Writes Sentences And Paragraphs. I Think Of The Sentence - Not Only What It Shares But, In A Sense, What It Looks Like. I Like To Match Words Not Only In A Way That Convey A Meaning, Possibly An Indirect Meaning, But Even At Times Words That Have A Kind Of Visual Correspondence.

When I Work I Have A Sculptor's Sense Of The Shape Of The Words I'm Making. I Use A Machine With Larger Than Average Letters: The Bigger The Better.

The Force Of A Death Should Be Enormous But How Can You Know What Kind Of Man You've Killed Or Who Was The Braver And Stronger If You Have To Peer Through Layers Of Glass That Deliver The Image But Obscure The Meaning Of The Act? War Has A Conscience Or It's Ordinary Murder.

When Birds Look Into Houses, What Impossible Worlds They See.

Some People Fake Their Death, I'm Faking My Life.

History Was Not A Matter Of Missing Minutes On The Tape. I Did Not Stand Helpless Before It. I Hewed To The Texture Of Collected Knowledge, Took Faith From The Solid And Availing Stuff Of Our Experience. Even If We Believe That History Is A Workwheel Powered By Human Blood -- Read The Speeches Of Mussolini -- At Least We've Known The Thing Together. A Single Narrative Sweep, Not Ten Thousand Wisps Of Disinformation. (82)

It's Impossible To Write About The Kennedy Assassination And Its Aftermath Without Taking Note Of Twenty-five Years Of Paranoia Which Has Collected Around That Event.

... There Was An Honesty Inherent In Bulkiness If It Is Just The Right Amount.

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?

Everything's A Scandal. Dying's A Scandal. But We All Do It.

Maybe When We Die, The First Thing We'll Say Is 'i Know This Feeling. I Was Here Before'.

Being Called A 'bad Citizen' Is A Compliment To A Novelist, At Least To My Mind. That's Exactly What We Ought To Do.

Writing Is A Concentrated Form Of Thinking.

The World Is Shrinking Into A Kind Of Technological Funnel. I Think People Are Drawn Into Their Technological Devices, And This Becomes A Kind Of Subjective Universe, Into Which Much Of The Rest Of The World Simply Does Not Enter.

It Takes Close Attention To See What Is Happening In Front Of You. It Takes Work, Pious Effort, To See What You Are Looking At.

Only A Catastrophe Gets Our Attention. We Want Them, We Depend On Them. As Long As They Happen Somewhere Else.

There Is No Lie In War Or Preparation Of War That Can't Be Defended.

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.

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?

In A Crisis The True Facts Are Whatever Other People Say They Are.

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.

It Is Possible To Be Homesick For A Place Even When You Are There.

Stories Are Consoling, Fiction Is One Of The Consolation Prizes For Having Lived In The World.

In The American Soul There Is A Lonely Individual Standing In A Vast Landscape.

The Power Of The Dead Is That We Think They See Us All The Time. The Dead Have A Presence. Is There A Level Of Energy Composed Solely Of The Dead? They Are Also In The Ground, Of Course, Asleep And Crumbling. Perhaps We Are What They Dream.

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.

Never Underestimate The Power Of The State To Act Out Its Own Massive Fantasies.

Everything I've Stated May Prove To Be Total Poppycock.... Perhaps Time Will Tell. Perhaps Time Will Do Nothing Of The Kind.

It Occurred To Me That Eating Is The Only Form Of Professionalism Most People Ever Attain.

Professionalism

People Who Are Powerless Make An Open Theater Of Violence.

The Dead Have A Presence.

He Took Pains To Avoid Self-depreciation, Self-mockery, Ambiguity, Irony, Subtlety, Vulnerability, A Civilized World-weariness And A Tragic Sense Of History--the Very Things, He Says, That Are Most Natural To Him.

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.

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.

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.

I Was Never Either Pro-culture Or Counter-culture. I Was In A Kind Of Middle State.

Counter Culture

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.

The Family Was An Art ... And The Dinner Table Was The Place It Found Expression.

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.

There Is A Set Of Balances And Rhythms To A Novel That We Can't Experience In Real Life. So I Think There Is A Sense In Which Fiction Can Rescue History From Confusion.

People Hurried Past, The Others Of The Street, Endless Anonymous, Twenty-one Lives Per Second, Race-walking In Their Faces And Pigments, Sprays Of Fleetest Being.

The Music I Like Best Is Kind Of Frozen In My Mind From The Sixties And Seventies. I Still Listen To The Same Jazz Music I Listened To When I Was Eighteen Years Old, And Like And Admire It Just As Much.

Human Existence Had To Have A Deeper Source Than Our Own Dank Fluids. Dank Or Rank. There Had To Be A Force Behind It, A Principal Being Who Was And Is And Ever Shall Be.

I Think Fiction Recues History From Its Confusions.

Even When You Self-destruct, You Want To Fail More, Lose More, Die More Than Others, Stink More Than Others.

Rushdie Is A Hostage.

I've Never Made An Outline For Any Novel That I've Written. Never.

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.

The Cheesecake Was Smooth And Lush, With The Personality Of A Warm And Well-to-do Uncle Who Knows A Hundred Dirty Jokes And Will Die Of Sexual Exertions In The Arms Of His Mistress.

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.

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.

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.

I Slept For Four Years. I Didn't Study Much Of Anything. I Majored In Something Called Communication Arts.

The Genius Of Rock Music Is That It Matched The Cultural Hysteria Around It.

In Cities No One Notices Specific Dying. Dying Is A Quality Of The Air. It's Everywhere And Nowhere.

I Don't Want To Do The Type Of Writing Where I Recite Biography, Parentage And Education. I Want To Rise Up From The Words On The Page And Do Something, Hurt Someone.

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.

Ask Yourself This Question. Do We Have To Be Humans Forever? Consciousness Is Exhausted. Back Now To Inorganic Matter. This Is What We Want. We Want To Be Stones In A Field.

We Feel Certain That The Extraterrestrial Message Is A Mathematical Code Of Some Kind. Probably A Number Code. Mathematics Is The One Language We Might Conceivably Have In Common With Other Forms Of Intelligent Life In The Universe. As I Understand It, There Is No Reality More Independent Of Our Perception And More True To Itself Than Mathematical Reality.

There's A Connection Between The Advances That Are Made In Technology And The Sense Of Primitive Fear People Develop In Response To It.

When He Died He Would Not End. The World Would End.

I Would Never Write In Response To What I Believe The Public Wanted Or Needed.

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.

Writing Is A Concentrated Form Of Thinking...a Young Writer Sees That With Words He Can Place Himself More Clearly Into The World. Words On A Page, That's All It Takes To Help Him Separate Himself From The Forces Around Him, Streets And People And Pressures And Feelings. He Learns To Think About These Things, To Ride His Own Sentences Into New Perceptions.

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.

There Were Moments When She Wasn't Talking So Much As Fading Into Time, Dropping Back Into Some Funnelled Stretch Of Recent Past.

I've Always Felt That My Subject Was Living In Dangerous Times.

You Feel Sorry For Yourself. You Think You're Missing Something And You Don't Know What It Is. You're Lonely Inside Your Life. You Have A Job And A Family And A Fully Executed Will, Already, At Your Age, Because The Whole Point Is To Die Prepared, Die Legal, With All The Papers Signed. Die Liquid, So They Can Convert To Cash.

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.

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.

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.´

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.

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.

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.

All Human Existence Is A Trick Of Light.

It Is So Much Simpler To Bury Reality Than It Is To Dispose Of Dreams

The Novel Is The Dream Release, The Suspension Of Reality That History Needs To Escape Its Own Brutal Confinements.

The Less Important You Are In An Office, The More They Expect The Happy Smile.

It Was Only When I Found Myself Writing Things I Didn't Realise I Knew That I Said, 'i'm A Writer Now.'

Writers In Repressive Societies Are Considered Dangerous. That's Why So Many Of Them Are In Jail.

It Frequently Happens That I Begin A Novel With Just A Visual Image Of Something, A Vague Sense Of People In Three Dimensional Space.

World Is Supposed To Mean Something That's Self-contained. But Nothing Is Self-contained.

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.

Bloomberg Weighed Three Hundred Pounds. This Itself Was Historical. I Revered His Weight. It Was An Affirmation Of Humanity's Reckless Potential; It Went Beyond Legend And Returned Through Mist To The Lovely Folly Of History. To Weigh Three Hundred Pounds. What Devout Vulgarity.

I Have Only A Bare Working Knowledge Of The Human Brain But It's Enough To Make Me Proud To Be An American.

I Am Ashamed Every Day, And More Ashamed The Next. But I Will Spend The Rest Of My Life In This Living Space Writing These Notes, This Journal, Recording My Acts And Reflections, Finding Some Honor, Some Worth At The Bottom Of Things. I Want Ten Thousand Pages That Will Stop The World.

Air Travel Reminds Us Who We Are. It's The Means By Which We Recognize Ourselves As Modern. The Process Removes Us From The World And Sets Us Apart From Each Other. We Wander In The Ambient Noise, Checking One More Time For The Flight Coupon, The Boarding Pass, The Visa. The Process Convinces Us That At Any Moment We May Have To Submit To The Force That Is Implied In All This, The Unknown Authority Behind It, Behind The Categories, The Languages We Don't Understand. This Vast Terminal Has Been Erected To Examine Souls.

You Become A Serious Novelist By Living Long Enough.

Somehow Pictures Always Lead To People As Masses. Books Belong To Individuals.

Fame And Secrecy Are The High And Low Ends Of The Same Fascination.

In My Experience, Writing A Novel Tends To Create Its Own Structure, Its Own Demands, Its Own Language, Its Own Ending. So For Much Of The Period In Which I'm Writing, I'm Waiting To Understand What's Going To Happen Next, And How And Where It's Going To Happen. In Some Cases, Fairly Early In The Process, I Do Know How A Book Will End. But Most Of The Time, Not At All, And In This Particular Case, Many Questions Are Still Unanswered, Even Though I've Been Working For Months.

I Don't Know What I Think About Certain Subjects, Even Today, Until I Sit Down And Try To Write About Them.

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.

Days Like This. I Look At You And Feel Electric. Tell Me You Don't Feel It Too."_eric Packer

Silence, Exile, Cunning And So On... It's My Nature To Keep Quiet About Most Things. Even The Ideas In My Work.

There's Never A Dearth Of Reasons To Shoot At The President.

The Future Is Always A Wholeness, A Sameness. We're All Tall And Happy There,' She Said. 'this Is Why The Future Fails. It Always Fails. It Can Never Be The Cruel Happy Place We Want To Make It.

Music Is Dangerous In So Many Ways. It's The Most Dangerous Thing In The World.

When I Work, I'm Just Translating The World Around Me In What Seems To Be Straightforward Terms. For My Readers, This Is Sometimes A Vision That's Not Familiar. But I'm Not Trying To Manipulate Reality. This Is Just What I See And Hear.

Sex Finds Us. Sex Sees Through Us. That's Why It's So Shattering. It Strips Us Of Appearances.

That's The World Out There, Little Green Apples And Infectious Disease.

A Writer Takes Earnest Measures To Secure His Solitude And Then Finds Endless Ways To Squander It.

Was She Naked?" Lasher Said. "to The Waist," Cotsakis Said. "from Which Direction?" Lasher Said.

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.

He Thinks He's Happy But It's Just A Nerve Cell In His Brain That's Getting Too Much Stimulation Or Too Little Stimulation.

You Gave Yourself Away, Word By Word, Every Time You Opened Your Trap To Speak.

Some Nights I Need To Be Held. Tonight I'm A Listener. So Nice To Lie In Rumpled Sheets And Listen. Cover Me With Words.

Man's Guilt In History And In The Tides Of His Own Blood Has Been Complicated By Technology, The Daily Seeping Falsehearted Death.

I'd Like To Lose Interest In Myself.

People Who Are In Power Make Their Arrangements In Secret, Largely As A Way Of Maintaining And Furthering That Power.

May The Days Be Aimless. Do Not Advance Action According To A Plan.

Naturally A Direct Comparison Of Terrorist And Novelist Is Complete Nonsense. But There Was Once A Time When The Novelist Also Had Some Influence On How His Contemporaries Thought, The Way They Saw The World, The Way They Lived.

We're The Last Billionth Of A Second In The Evolution Of Matter.

I Long For The Days Of Disorder. I Want Them Back, The Days When I Was Alive On The Earth, Rippling In The Quick Of My Skin, Heedless And Real. I Was Dumb-muscled And Angry And Real. This Is What I Long For, The Breach Of Peace, The Days Of Disarray When I Walked Real Streets And Did Things Slap-bang And Felt Angry And Ready All The Time, A Danger To Others And A Distant Mystery To Myself.

All Who Have Their Reward On Earth, The Fruits Of Painful Superstition And Blind Zeal, Naught Seeking But The Praise Of Men, Here Find Fit Retribution, Empty As Their Deeds.

That's What In Theory Differentiates A Writer From Everyone Else. You See And Hear More Clearly.

America Can Be Saved Only By What It's Trying To Destroy.

In My Experience, Writing A Novel Tends To Create Its Own Structure, Its Own Demands, Its Own Language, Its Own Ending.

There Is A World Inside The World.

We Commit Our Crimes At Night And Reveal Ourselves In The High Noon Of Studio Lights.

Everything Is Barely Weeks. Everything Is Days. We Have Minutes To Live.

The World Isn't Going To Be Destroyed, But You Don't Feel Safe Anymore In Your Plane Or Train Or Office Or Auditorium.

People Will Always Make Comparisons.

Time Is A Corporate Asset Now. It Belongs To The Free Market System. The Present Is Harder To Find... The Future Becomes Insistent.

As Technology Advances In Complexity And Scope, Fear Becomes More Primitive.

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.

Mirrors And Images. Or Sex And Love. These Are Two Separate Systems That We Miserably Try To Link.

What We Are Reluctant To Touch Often Seems The Very Fabric Of Our Salvation.

Money Has Lost Its Narrative Quality The Way Painting Did Once Upon A Time. Money Is Talking To Itself.

Once Upon A Time

Every Advance In Knowledge And Technique Is Matched By A New Kind Of Death, A New Strain. Death Adapts, Like A Viral Agent.

...because What's The Meaning Of Doing Dishes If You're Not Driven By Something Beyond Necessity.

A Photograph Is A Universe Of Dots. The Grain, The Halide, The Little Silver Things Clumped In The Emulsion. Once You Get Inside A Dot, You Gain Access To Hidden Information, You Slide Into The Smallest Event. This Is What Technology Does. It Peels Back The Shadows And Redeems The Dazed And Rumbling Past. It Makes Reality Come True.

Hardship Makes The World Obscure.

We Seem To Believe It Is Possible To Ward Off Death By Following Rules Of Good Grooming.

Following Rules

Brilliant People Never Think Of The Lives They Smash, Being Brilliant.

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.

California Deserves Whatever It Gets. Californians Invented The Concept Of Life-style. This Alone Warrants Their Doom.

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.

The Language Of My Books Has Shaped Me As A Man.

I'm A Novelist, Period. An American Novelist.

I Think My Work Is Influenced By The Fact That We're Living In Dangerous Times. If I Could Put It In A Sentence, In Fact, My Work Is About Just That: Living In Dangerous Times.

It Was Only After Two Years' Work That It Occurred To Me That I Was A Writer. I Had No Particular Expectation That The Novel Would Ever Be Published, Because It Was Sort Of A Mess. It Was Only When I Found Myself Writing Things I Didn't Realise I Knew That I Said, 'i'm A Writer Now.' The Novel Had Become An Incentive To Deeper Thinking. That's Really What Writing Is—an Intense Form Of Thought.

I Think Fiction Comes From Everything You've Ever Done, And Said, And Dreamed, And Imagined. It Comes From Everything You've Read And Haven't Read... I Think My Work Comes Out Of The Culture Of The World Around Me. I Think That's Where My Language Comes From.

He Speaks In Your Voice, American, And There's A Shine In His Eye That's Halfway Hopeful.

Digital Clocks Took The 'space' Out Of Time.

Fame Requires Every Kind Of Excess. I Mean True Fame, A Devouring Neon, Not The Sombre Renown Of Waning Statesmen Or Chinless Kings.

He Wanted Paper And Something To Write With, Some Way To Sustain A Thought, To Place It In The World.

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.

Before Pop Art, There Was Such A Thing As Bad Taste. Now There's Kitsch, Schlock, Camp, And Porn.

Let's Enjoy The Aimless Days While We Still Can.

I've Always Liked Being Relatively Obscure. I Feel That's Where I Belong, That's Where My Work Belongs.

There Are No Amateurs In The World Of Children.

In Our World We Sleep And Eat The Image And Pray To It And Wear It Too.

You Need To Know Things The Others Don't Know. It's What No One Knows About You That Allows You To Know Yourself.

It's Healthier To Reject Certain Cautions Than Fall In Line.

People Had No Tolerance For Your Particular Hardship Unless You Knew How To Entertain Them With It.

Prayer Is A Practical Strategy, The Gaining Of Temporal Advantage In The Capital Markets Of Sin And Remission.

It Is All Falling Indelibly Into The Past.

I Think It's Only In A Crisis That Americans See Other People. It Has To Be An American Crisis, Of Course. If Two Countries Fight That Do Not Supply The Americans With Some Precious Commodity, Then The Education Of The Public Does Not Take Place. But When The Dictator Falls, When The Oil Is Threatened, Then You Turn On The Television And They Tell You Where The Country Is, What The Language Is, How To Pronounce The Names Of The Leaders, What The Religion Is All About, And Maybe You Can Cut Out Recipes In The Newspaper Of Persian Dishes.

Words Are Not Necessary To One's Experience Of The True Life.

I Think Silence Is The Condition You Accept As The Judgment On Your Crimes.

There's Always A Period Of Curious Fear Between The First Sweet-smelling Breeze And The Time When The Rain Comes Cracking Down.

Insanity's So Personal. It's Hard To Know Who Shares Our Secrets.

I Felt Myself Getting Whiter... What Does It Mean To Become White? How Does It Feel To See Death In The Flesh, Come To Gather You In?

Stories Have No Point If They Don't Absorb Our Terror.

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Allison Pearson

E. Stanley Jones

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