It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience... For that reason, reading a novel is potentially a significant act. Because there are so many varieties of human experience, so many kinds of interaction between humans, and so many ways of creating patterns in the novel that can’t be created in a short story, a play, a poem or a movie. The novel, simply, offers more opportunities for a reader to understand the world better, including the world of artistic creation. That sounds pretty grand, but I think it’s true.

— Don DeLillo

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.

— Don DeLillo

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.

— Don DeLillo

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 realize 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.

— Don DeLillo

It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube. 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.

— Don DeLillo

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.

— Don DeLillo

I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether I can outlive it.

— Don DeLillo

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

— Don DeLillo

Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your causal gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves of identity and being. There are no amateurs in the world of children

— Don DeLillo

Man’s guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping false hearted death.

— Don DeLillo