Don DelilloThinkers

Advertising is a field that has discoved a universal third person in America, the man we all want to be. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer.

The Amateur is an impossible thing for children. There are no amateurs in the world of children.

America is a place that can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.

America is the world's living myth. Our function is to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on.

The American is only able to see other people in a crisis. It has to be an American crisis, of course.

The American soul is that wherein a lonely individual is standing in a vast landscape.

The Artist is a role that has ceded its ability to alter the inner life of culture to bomb-makers and gunmen.

California is a place that deserves whatever it gets. It invented the concept of life-style, and this alone warrants its doom.

Capital is a stuff that burns off the nuance in a culture. It's not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.

The Catastrophe is wanted and depended on, as long as they happen somewhere else, for only a catastrophe gets our attention.

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.