Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “I’ve always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

454. “What terrorists gain, novelists lose.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

456. “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

457. “Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck. Things have no limits now. Money has no limits. I don’t understand money anymore. Money is undone. Violence is undone, violence is easier now, it’s uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values.”

— Don DeLillo

458. “He had a good vocabulary except when he was talking to someone.”

— Don DeLillo

459. “Rushdie is a hostage.”

— Don DeLillo

460. “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

461. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

463. “We yell and scold as a way of paying homage to each other’s views. This is the burden of friendship between extremely high-strung individuals.”

— Don DeLillo

464. “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

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

471. “I feel like an overwritten paragraph.”

— Don DeLillo

472. “Too much engenders too much.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

475. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

481. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

483. “Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That’s why so many of them are in jail.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

485. “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

486. “People will always make comparisons.”

— Don DeLillo

487. “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

488. “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

489. “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

490. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

493. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

495. “There’s a certain man, an archetype, he’s a model of dependability for his male friends, all the things a friend should be, an ally and confidant, lends money, gives advice, loyal and so on, but sheer hell on women. Living breathing hell. The closer a woman gets, the clearer it becomes to him that she is not one of his male friends. And the more awful it becomes for her. This is Keith. This is the man you’re going to marry.”

— Don DeLillo

496. “Ordinary moments make the life. This is what she knew to be trustworthy and this is what I learned, eventually, from those years we spent together. No leaps or falls. I inhale the little drizzly details of the past and know who I am. What I failed to know before is clearer now, filtered up through time, an experience belonging to no one else, not remotely, no one, anyone, ever. I watch her use the roller to remove lint from her cloth coat. Define coat, I tell myself. Define time, define space.”

— Don DeLillo

497. “People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.”

— Don DeLillo

498. “I had to wonder whether this interval had any more spread and breadth than just another sequestered moment, bordered by closed doors. We.”

— Don DeLillo

499. “It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space.”

— Don DeLillo

500. “Only absences were fully shared.”

— Don DeLillo