"Certainly there is very little about rock music in GREAT JONES STREET, although the hero is a musician. The interesting thing about that particular character is that he seems to be at a crossroad between murder and suicide. For me, that defines the period between 1965 and 1975, say, and I thought it was best exemplified in a rock-music star."
"I do think we can connect novelists and terrorists here. In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act..True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to."
"[T]here were periods in Greece when I tasted and saw and heard with much more sharpness and clarity than I'd ever done before or since. And [in THE NAMES] I wanted to discover a sentence, a way of writing sentences that would be the prose counterpart to that clarity--that sensuous clarity of the Aegean experience."
"What I was really getting at in Running Dog was a sense of the terrible acquisitiveness in which we live, coupled with a final indifference to the object. After all the mad attempts to acquire the thing, everyone suddenly decides that, well, maybe we really don't care about this so much anyway."
"[I]t was through Joyce that I learned to see something in language that carried a radiance, something that made me feel the beauty and fervor of words, the sense that a word has a light and a history."
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DeLillo was raised in the Bronx as a Catholic and was educated by Jesuits. More interested in sports than in literature, he discovered books when he held a boring summer job and had nothing else to do but read. He has a B.A. from Fordham (1958) and worked in advertising after graduation. He published his first short story in 1960. His first novel, AMERICANA, was published in 1971. DeLillo chronicles modern mass culture with an astute eye, and is considered one of the most important late 20th-cen more...
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11/20/1936 New York, New York, Middle Atlantic States, Northeastern States, United States,
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Amazing book. A little patchy at times, perhaps a little overambitious, but overall a masterpiece. Took me ages to get through and often I didn't always follow what was going on but never really cared as I was happy to soak up the often stunning prose. Worth the effort.