Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions. Don DeLillo
About This Quote

Poetry has been called the "purest distillation of human experience." As a mystery writer, I have been writing books for over 20 years. After writing so many words, I have learned a few things. Poetry is a concentrated form of thought. Poems, in particular, are a concentrated form of storytelling.

Each poem has a story to tell about life and love and death and all the rest of it. Poetry is a way to think about life, to get it all down on paper, to see it with fresh eyes, to be able to look at your own life in poetic terms rather than just as the world around you.

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More Quotes By Don DeLillo
  1. What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

  2. 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...

  3. No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

  4. I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.

  5. The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are...

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