Fear is intense self-awareness.

— Don DeLillo

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.

— Don DeLillo

God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the .45 to even things up.

— Don DeLillo

He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows.

— Don DeLillo

He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.

— Don DeLillo

How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take the pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion, making something brainy and rule-bound and smooth, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to repeat the process.

— Don DeLillo

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.

— Don DeLillo

How language is webbed in the senses. Out of sand-blazed brilliance into quirky minds such as his, into touch, taste and fragrance. He thought he'd linger just a bit longer, let the bath take total hold, ease and alleviate, before he put on clothes and entered the complex boxes where people do their living. Nothing fits the body so well as water.

— Don DeLillo

How many times do two people have to fuck before one of them deserves to die?" _Eric Packer

— Don DeLillo

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?

— Don DeLillo