Don DeLillo

"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 Im dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying."

"Terror makes the new future possible. All men one man, Men live in history as never before. He is saying we make an change history minute by minute. History is not the book or the human memory. We do history in the morning and change it after lunch."

"I think whatll happen in the not-too-distant future is that well have humane wars. Each side agrees to use clean bombs. And each side agrees to limit the amount of megatons he uses. In other words, well get together with them beforehand and therell be an agreement that if the issue cant be settled, whatever the issue might be, then lets make sure we keep our war as relatively clean as possible."

"Ive come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version."

"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."

"Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S. Why not use it?"

"War is the ultimate realization of modern technology."

"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."

"I had centered myself, learning of the existence of an interior motion, a shift in the levels from isolation to solitude to wordlessness to immobility. When Opel occupied that center I became the thing that swirled."

"I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We dont need substitutes because weve got the real thing."

"I think fiction rescues history from its confusions."

"Im a novelist, period. An American novelist."