Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When the going gets tough the tough get going.”

— Don DeLillo

2. “It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.”

— Don DeLillo

3. “I hate my life. I’m at the point where I want to hear about other people’s lives. It’s like switching from fiction to biography.”

— Don DeLillo

Featured in: Depression Quotes

4. “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.”

— Don DeLillo

5. “Some people fake their death, I’m faking my life.”

— Don DeLillo

6. “As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.”

— Don DeLillo

7. “Tourism is the march of stupidity.”

— Don DeLillo

8. “Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.”

— Don DeLillo

Featured in: Fun Quotes

9. “We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.”

— Don DeLillo

10. “That’s why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.”

— Don DeLillo

11. “The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements.”

— Don DeLillo

12. “Longing on a large scale makes history.”

— Don DeLillo

13. “I don’t consider myself paranoid at all. I think I see things exactly as they are.”

— Don DeLillo

14. “War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.”

— Don DeLillo

15. “When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.”

— Don DeLillo

16. “If you know you’re worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.”

— Don DeLillo

17. “The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.”

— Don DeLillo

18. “The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.”

— Don DeLillo

19. “Pain is just another form of information.”

— Don DeLillo

20. “In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are.”

— Don DeLillo

21. “It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.”

— Don DeLillo

22. “The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation.”

— Don DeLillo

23. “There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?”

— Don DeLillo

24. “Technology is lust removed from nature.”

— Don DeLillo

25. “I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore.”

— Don DeLillo

26. “What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.”

— Don DeLillo

27. “A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.”

— Don DeLillo

28. “Talent is more erotic when it’s wasted.”

— Don DeLillo

29. “Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of inter-communication is awe-inspiring.”

— Don DeLillo

30. “A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn’t already, and make a million.”

— Don DeLillo

31. “There is a world inside the world.”

— Don DeLillo

32. “All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.”

— Don DeLillo

33. “Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.”

— Don DeLillo

34. “Hardship makes the world obscure.”

— Don DeLillo

35. “America can be saved only by what it’s trying to destroy.”

— Don DeLillo

36. “I’ve got death inside me. It’s just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.”

— Don DeLillo

37. “Let’s enjoy the aimless days while we still can.”

— Don DeLillo

38. “The more things I threw away, the more I found.”

— Don DeLillo

39. “Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.”

— Don DeLillo

40. “Sex finds us. Sex sees through us. That’s why it’s so shattering. It strips us of appearances.”

— Don DeLillo

41. “There’s a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer’s will to live.”

— Don DeLillo

42. “He has abandoned his life to understanding that moment in Dallas, the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century.”

— Don DeLillo

43. “It’s not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.”

— Don DeLillo

44. “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.”

— Don DeLillo

45. “Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there’s kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.”

— Don DeLillo

46. “Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.”

— Don DeLillo

47. “For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.”

— Don DeLillo

48. “A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot...”

— Don DeLillo

49. “Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving.”

— Don DeLillo

50. “It is all falling indelibly into the past.”

— Don DeLillo