Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is … - Don DeLillo

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If you love deeply, you're going to get hurt badly. But it's still worth it.

Don DeLillo

Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake. And I'm the actor made up for the laying-out.

Business, Ceremonial, Mean, Past, Portrait, Powerful

Same Author Quotes

Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.

Brain, Life, Molecules, Rushing

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

Long, Moving, Shock, Sometimes, Trust, Wear

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.

Book, Length, Novel, Three, Writing

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

Freedom, Hero, Identity, Mainly, Survive, Writing

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

Concentrated, Form, Thinking, Writing