Daily Inspiration Quote by Don DeLillo

DeLillo is doing that characteristically DeLillo move: acknowledging a towering predecessor while refusing the simple lineage story. He doesn’t claim Joyce as a set of techniques he can itemize (stream of consciousness, epiphany, Dublin-as-universe); he claims Joyce as atmosphere. “In a very general way” is not evasiveness so much as a protective hedge against the lazy critical impulse to turn influence into a scavenger hunt. He’s telling you the point isn’t spotting Joycean fingerprints in the sentences, it’s what Joyce licensed: the idea that style isn’t ornament but meaning.

The phrasing “inspiration and a model for the beauty of language” is also quietly revisionist. Joyce is often reduced to difficulty, to the virtuoso who built a maze and dared you to escape. DeLillo reframes him as a standard of beauty, which is slyly polemical coming from a novelist associated with paranoia, media static, and the American vernacular. It suggests DeLillo’s cool surfaces aren’t an escape from feeling; they’re his version of music.

Context matters: DeLillo comes of age in a postwar U.S. where language is being industrialized by advertising, television, corporate speech, and later the churn of news. Joyce becomes a counterweight, a proof that English can still be strange, precise, enchanted. The subtext is an ethics of attention: if the world is increasingly mediated, the writer’s job is to make language newly sensate again, not by copying Joyce’s tricks but by inheriting his seriousness about the sentence as an event.