Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “When I work I have a sculptor’s sense of the shape of the words I’m making. I use a machine with larger than average letters: the bigger the better.”

— Don DeLillo

452. “Bemoan technology all you want. It expands your self-esteem and connects you in your well-pressed suit to the things that slip through the world otherwise unperceived.”

— Don DeLillo

453. “Some good-bad nights I spent, loving my self-hatred.”

— Don DeLillo

454. “Don’t you sometimes feel a power in you? An extreme state of good health. An arrogant healthiness. That’s it. You are feeling so good you begin thinking you’re a little superior to most people. An optimism about yourself that you generate at the expense of others. Don’t you sometimes feel this?”

— Don DeLillo

455. “Traffic was stopped dead and I nudged the window switch and listened to the blowing horns approach peak volume. We were trapped in our own obsessive clamor.”

— Don DeLillo

456. “Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror. Today, the men who shape and inflence human consciousness are the terrorists.”

— Don DeLillo

457. “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.”

— Don DeLillo

458. “I want to die and be finished forever. Don’t you want to die?” he said. “I don’t know.” “What’s the point of living if we don’t die at the end of it?” In.”

— Don DeLillo

459. “What’s the importance of a photograph if you know the writer’s work? But people still want the image, don’t they? The writer’s face is the surface of the work. It’s a clue to the mystery inside.”

— Don DeLillo

460. “He was a foreigner here. There was no profit in discontent. He could not apply his bitterness. It was American-made and had no local standing. For the first time he realized what a dangerous thing he’d done, leaving his country. He struggled against this awareness. He hated knowing something he didn’t want to know.”

— Don DeLillo

461. “There’s less and less for people to talk to when they talk to me. I hope diminishing existence isn’t contagious.”

— Don DeLillo

462. “Shoes are like people. They adjust to situations.”

— Don DeLillo

463. “I feel like an overwritten paragraph.”

— Don DeLillo

464. “Too much engenders too much.”

— Don DeLillo

465. “Even at a distance, her mouth showed the small pursed conceit of a remark in the making.”

— Don DeLillo

466. “One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness.”

— Don DeLillo

467. “I would never write in response to what I believe the public wanted or needed.”

— Don DeLillo

468. “The self. What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?”

— Don DeLillo

469. “A police car went by with its siren going, a rotary slurping noise, it sounded like the blender in their kitchen – she made fruit shakes compulsively that they felt morally bound to drink.”

— Don DeLillo

470. “Naturally a direct comparison of terrorist and novelist is complete nonsense. But there was once a time when the novelist also had some influence on how his contemporaries thought, the way they saw the world, the way they lived.”

— Don DeLillo

471. “It’s healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line.”

— Don DeLillo

472. “How do we stand with others when the things that separate us are imposed at birth, when the separation haunts us and follows us day and night?”

— Don DeLillo

473. “I’ve always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.”

— Don DeLillo

474. “He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.”

— Don DeLillo

475. “I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.”

— Don DeLillo

476. “What terrorists gain, novelists lose.”

— Don DeLillo

477. “Vanity is a defensive quality. it contains an element of fear.”

— Don DeLillo

478. “There is no lie in war or preparation of war that can’t be defended.”

— Don DeLillo

479. “He had ambitions on my behalf and more or less at my expense. This is the custom among men who have failed to be heroes; their sons must prove that the seed was not impoverished.”

— Don DeLillo

480. “You become a serious novelist by living long enough.”

— Don DeLillo

481. “Everything was on television last night.”

— Don DeLillo

482. “But there are different kinds of death, David. And I prefer that kind, his kind, to the death I’ve been fighting all my life.”

— Don DeLillo

483. “People will always make comparisons.”

— Don DeLillo

484. “I see them in the primitive silkscreen the brain is able to produce, maybe eight inches in front of my closed eyes, miniaturised by time and distance, riddled by visual static, each figure a dancing red ribbon. These are among the people I’ve tried to know twice, the second time in memory and language. Through them, myself. They are what I’ve become, in ways I don’t understand but which I believe will accrue to a rounded truth, a second life for me as well as for them.”

— Don DeLillo

485. “The women kept washing floors. It seemed to be what they did in difficult times. Unvarying things, she saw, must have a deeper value than we know.”

— Don DeLillo

486. “This is what long journeys are for. To see what’s back behind you, lengthen the view, find the patterns, know the people, consider the significance of one matter or another and then curse yourself or bless yourself or tell yourself, in my father’s situation, that you’ll have a chance to do it all over again, with variations.”

— Don DeLillo

487. “I know it’s thankless to be sensible in the face of someone’s primitive distrust.”

— Don DeLillo

488. “I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.”

— Don DeLillo

489. “I’d been doing this for a while, attempting to define a word for an object or even a concept. Define loyalty, define truth. I had to stop before it killed me. The.”

— Don DeLillo

490. “It’s a Cadillac all right.” “The Rolls-Royce of automobiles,” Ottum.”

— Don DeLillo

491. “She wasn’t a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself.”

— Don DeLillo

492. “Was he at the movies to see a movie, she said, or maybe more narrowly, more essentially, simply to be at the movies?”

— Don DeLillo

493. “We’re the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter.”

— Don DeLillo

494. “Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely.”

— Don DeLillo

495. “People had hoped to be caught up in something bigger than themselves. They thought it would be a shared crisis. They would feel a sense of shared purpose, shared destiny. Like a snowstorm that blankets a large city – but lasting months, lasting years, carrying everyone along, creating fellow feeling where there was only suspicion and fear. The war would ennoble everything we say and do. What was impersonal would become personal. What was solitary would be shared.”

— Don DeLillo

496. “There’s a neat correlation between the complexity of the hardware and the lack of genuine attachments. Devices make everyone pliant. There’s a general sponginess, a lack of conviction.”

— Don DeLillo

497. “Insanity’s so personal. It’s hard to know who shares our secrets.”

— Don DeLillo

498. “He told me that I hadn’t done anything yet. Hadn’t lived yet. All you do is pass the time, he said.”

— Don DeLillo

499. “A writer decides to follow some ideas and not others for reasons that aren’t always clear to him. It’s often a matter of intuition.”

— Don DeLillo

500. “Grass: I live in a great steel tower that reflects the blazing sun. People catch fire just walking by. The more bodies that pile up around you, the greater your equity, the stronger your power, the longer you live. This is the point of living in a high rise. To see the bodies pile up at sunset, the nostalgic hour, the hour of summing up, stirring the cocktails, feeling the great tower sway in the hot winds.”

— Don DeLillo