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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.

-Don DeLillo

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We Don't Really Know

Don DeLillo

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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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Making Things Difficult For The Reader Is Less An Attack On The Reader Than It Is On The Age And Its Facile Knowledge-market.

Film Is More Than The Twentieth-century Art. It's Another Part Of The Twentieth-century Mind. It's The World Seen From Inside. We've Come To A Certain Point In The History Of Film. If A Thing Can Be Filmed, The Film Is Implied In The Thing Itself. This Is Where We Are. The Twentieth Century Is On Film. You Have To Ask Yourself If There's Anything About Us More Important Than The Fact That We're Constantly On Film, Constantly Watching Ourselves.

The Excitement Of Theatre Is Palpable But The Frustrations, And The Complete Absence Of A Definitive Evening - The Play As Text Means Practically Nothing In A Way - , There's No Particular Performance That Is Definitive In The Way A Novel Is A Solid Object You Hold In Your Hands And Here It Is. You Can't Say That About A Play. If The Novel Gives Us A Sense Of Throbbing Consciousness, Theater Is Pure Soul, Beautiful And Elusive.

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

Rushdie Is A Hostage.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

When My Head Is In The Typewriter The Last Thing On My Mind Is Some Imaginary Reader. I Don't Have An Audience; I Have A Set Of Standards.

Doesn't Our Knowledge Of Death Make Life More Precious?' What Good Is A Preciousness Based On Fear And Anxiety? It's An Anxious Quivering Thing

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

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

A Mystery Novel Localizes The Awesome Force Of The Real Death Outside The Book, Winds It Tightly In A Plot.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I Think If You Maintain A Force In The World That Comes Into People's Sleep, You Are Exercising A Meaningful Power.

You Shout Because It Makes You Brave Or You Want To Announce Your Recklessness.

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.

All Human Existence Is A Trick Of Light.

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

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.

You Become A Serious Novelist By Living Long Enough.

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

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.

Ecology Is Boring For The Same Reason That Destruction Is Fun.

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It Is Interesting ... How Weapons Reflect The Soul Of The Maker.

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People Will Always Make Comparisons.

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Dying Was Just An Extended Version Of Ash Wednesday.

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Evil Is Movement Towards Void.

What Terrorists Gain, Novelists Lose.

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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.

People Will Not Die. Isn't This The Creed Of The New Culture? People Will Be Absorbed In Streams Of Information. I Know Nothing About This. Computers Will Die. They're Dying In Their Present Form. They're Just About Dead As Distinct Units.

Longing On A Large Scale Makes History.

Eye Contact Was A Delicate Matter. A Quarter Second Of A Shared Glance Was A Violation Of Agreements That Made The City Operational.

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

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To A Writer, Madness Is A Final Distillation Of Self, A Final Editing Down. It's The Drowning Out Of False Voices.

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

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

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

When You Try To Unravel Something You've Written, You Belittle It In A Way. It Was Created As A Mystery.

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.

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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.

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

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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You Have To Break Through The Structure Of Your Own Stonework Habit Just To Make Yourself Listen.

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

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

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.

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.

We Surrounded Ourselves With Smoke And Loud Noise. That's The Way We Chose To Live. I'm Prepared To Defend It.

I'm Not Reclusive At All. Just Private.

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

Perhaps We've Invented Conspiracies For Our Own Psychic Well-being, To Heal Ourselves.

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

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.

True Terror Is A Language And A Vision. There Is A Deep Narrative Structure To Terrorist Acts, And They Infiltrate And Alter Consciousness In Ways That Writers Used To Aspire To.

Narrative Structure

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.

There Are Dead Stars That Still Shine Because Their Light Is Trapped In Time. Where Do I Stand In This Light, Which Does Not Strictly Exist? (155)

Some People Are Larger Than Life. Hitler Is Larger Than Death.

Larger Than Life

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.

I Am Ashamed Every Day, And More Ashamed The Next.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Novel Determines Its Own Size And Shape And I've Never Tried To Stretch An Idea Beyond The Frame And Structure It Seemed To Require.

There Are Times When You Want To Stop Working At Faith And Just Be Washed In A Blowing Wind That Tells You Everything.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I Used To Think It Was Possible For An Artist To Alter The Inner Life Of The Culture. Now Bomb-makers And Gunmen Have Taken That Territory.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I Hate My Life. I'm At The Point Where I Want To Hear About Other People's Lives. It's Like Switching From Fiction To Biography.

Because Friends Have To Be Brutally Honest With Each Other. I'd Feel Terrible If I Didn't Tell You What I Was Thinking, Especially At A Time Like This

Once You've Seen The Signs About The Barn, It Becomes Impossible To See The Barn.

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

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

I Didn’t Do Anything. I Don’t Have An Explanation, I Don’t Know Why I Wanted To Write. I Did Some Short Stories At That Time, But Very Infrequently. I Quit My Job Just To Quit. I Didn’t Quit My Job To Write Fiction. I Just Didn’t Want To Work Anymore

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

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

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

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

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 More Things I Threw Away, The More I Found.

I Embarked On My Life - I Didn't Do Anything. I Don't Have An Explanation.

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.

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

War Is The Ultimate Realization Of Modern Technology.

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.

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.

Technology Is Lust Removed From Nature.

You Live In A Tower That Soars To Heaven And Goes Unpunished By God.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

One Of My Earliest Memories As A Reader - I Don't Know How Old I Was, Quite Young - Was A Poem Of His, Called "fog," And I Remember The First Verse, "the Fog Comes / On Little Cat Feet".

There Are No Amateurs In The World Of Children.

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.

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.

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

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

I Am Very Unmusical. I Can't Carry A Tune. I Would Never Be Able To Play An Instrument.

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.

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

In The Face Of Technology, Everything Becomes A Little Atavistic.

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

It's Not Enough To Hate Your Enemy. You Have To Understand How The Two Of You Bring Each Other To Deep Completion.

Something Lurked Inside The Truth.

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.

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

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

Be Willing To Die For Your Beliefs, Or Computer Printouts Of Your Beliefs.

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

To Be A Tourist Is To Escape Accountability.

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.

Look Past The Violence. There Is A Wonderful Brimming Spirit Of Innocence And Fun.

The Question Of Dying Becomes A Wise Reminder. It Cures Us Of Our Innocence Of The Future.

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

Everyone Who Does Not Live In Berlin Lives In Brooklyn Now.

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.

A Person Rises On A Word And Falls On A Syllable.

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

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

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.

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

It's True That Some Of Us Become Better Writers By Living Long Enough. But This Is Also How We Become Worse Writers. The Trick Is To Die In Between.

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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

People Think About Who They Are In The Stillest Hour Of The Night.

Say Heat. Say Wet Between My Legs. Say Legs. Seriously, I Want You To. Stockings. Whisper It. The Word Is Meant To Be Whispered.

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