Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “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

452. “Self-pity oozed through my soul. I tried to relax and enjoy it.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

454. “I feel like an overwritten paragraph.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

456. “American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.”

— Don DeLillo

457. “This is what love comes down to, things that happen and what we say about them.”

— Don DeLillo

458. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

460. “Once you start a file, Delphine, it’s just a matter of time before the material comes pouring in. Notes, lists, photos, rumors. Every bit and piece and whisper in the world that doesn’t have a life until someone comes along to collect it. It’s all been waiting just for you.”

— Don DeLillo

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

468. “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

469. “I want to put your voice back inside your body, where it belongs.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

471. “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

472. “And what do you remember, finally, when everyone has gone home and the streets are empty of devotion and hope, swept by river wind? Is the memory thin and bitter and does it shame you with its fundamental untruth – all nuance and wishful silhouette? Or does the power of transcendence linger, the sense of an event that violates natural forces, something holy that throbs on the hot horizon, the vision you crave because you need a sign to stand against your doubt?”

— Don DeLillo

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

481. “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

482. “People will always make comparisons.”

— Don DeLillo

483. “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

484. “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

485. “In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

487. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

491. “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

492. “Only absences were fully shared.”

— 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. “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

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. “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

498. “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

499. “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

500. “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