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"Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure."
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"Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents."
"The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry."
"Any plan of administration which contemplates a concentrating of responsibility is open to the dangers which follow the creation of a bureaucracy."
"The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins."
"I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years."
"New Rule: Stop leaving couches on the sidewalk. Besides being lazy and ugly, it's animal cruelty. You teach your dog not to pee on the couch, and then when you take him to the place he's supposed to pee, there's a couch."
"The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand."
"She thought of the city at night, of cities at night. Discarded constellations of old stars, fallen from the sky, rearranged on Earth in patterns and pathways and towers. Invaded by weevils that have learned to walk upright."
"Being in New York is an almost overwhelming experience. While Washington, D.C., is my favorite American city, I regard New York City as the most amazing city in the world. No other comes close. It is an incredible, inexhaustible engine."
Explore more quotes by Don DeLillo
"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?"
"When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery."
"Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail."
"There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down."
"I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood."
"I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore."
"The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence."
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