Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don’t know. It’s what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”

— Don DeLillo

102. “This is not a story about your disappointment at my silence. The theme of this story is my pain and my attempts to end it.”

— Don DeLillo

103. “The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.”

— Don DeLillo

104. “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.”

— Don DeLillo

105. “Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.”

— Don DeLillo

106. “Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.”

— Don DeLillo

107. “In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are. No one’s knowledge is less secure than your own.”

— Don DeLillo

108. “The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. They walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go, clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in the aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic, trying to remember where they’d seen the Cream of Wheat.”

— Don DeLillo

109. “One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.”

— Don DeLillo

110. “In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.”

— Don DeLillo

111. “A dead afternoon in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.”

— Don DeLillo

112. “To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.”

— Don DeLillo

113. “Baseball’s oh so simple. You tag a man, he’s out. How different from being it. What spectral genius in the term, that curious part of childhood that sees through the rhymes and nonsense words, past the hidings and seekings and pretendings to something old and dank, some medieval awe, he thought, or earlier, even, that crawls beneath the midnight skin.”

— Don DeLillo

114. “The modern meaning of life’s end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?”

— Don DeLillo

115. “I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next.”

— Don DeLillo

116. “The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.”

— Don DeLillo

117. “He thinks he’s happy but it’s just a nerve cell in his brain that’s getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.”

— Don DeLillo

118. “Men in small rooms, in isolation. A cell is the basic state. They put you in a room and lock the door. So simple it’s a form of genius. This is the final size of all the forces around you. Eight by fifteen.”

— Don DeLillo

119. “People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.”

— Don DeLillo

120. “It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.”

— Don DeLillo

121. “There’s always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.”

— Don DeLillo

122. “What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.”

— Don DeLillo

123. “I will read,” she said. “But I don’t want you to choose anything that has men inside women, quote-quote, or men entering women. ‘I entered her.’ ‘He entered me.’ We’re not lobbies or elevators. ‘I wanted him inside me,’ as if he could crawl completely in, sign the register, sleep, eat, so forth. Can we agree on that? I don’t care what these people do as long as they don’t enter or get entered.”

— Don DeLillo

124. “It’s impossible to write about the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath without taking note of twenty-five years of paranoia which has collected around that event.”

— Don DeLillo

125. “Pleasure is not diversion but urgent life, a social order perceived as temporary.”

— Don DeLillo

126. “The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.”

— Don DeLillo

127. “These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.”

— Don DeLillo

128. “Technology and violence are interdependent.”

— Don DeLillo

129. “The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.”

— Don DeLillo

130. “Transient pleasures, drastic measures.”

— Don DeLillo

131. “Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination.”

— Don DeLillo

132. “People will not die. Isn’t this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They’re dying in their present form. They’re just about dead as distinct units.”

— Don DeLillo

133. “The music I like best is kind of frozen in my mind from the Sixties and Seventies. I still listen to the same jazz music I listened to when I was eighteen years old, and like and admire it just as much.”

— Don DeLillo

134. “I think silence is the condition you accept as the judgment on your crimes.”

— Don DeLillo

135. “Is it better to commit evil and attempt to balance it with an exalted act than to live a resolutely neutral life?”

— Don DeLillo

136. “It was important for him to believe that he’d spent his life among people who kept missing the point.”

— Don DeLillo

137. “I think my work is influenced by the fact that we’re living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times.”

— Don DeLillo

138. “Civilization did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting scenes on bronze gates and whispered philosophy under the stars, with garbage as a noisome offshoot, swept away and forgotten. No, garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn’t discard, to reprocess what we couldn’t use. Garbage pushed back.”

— Don DeLillo

139. “There’s the life and there’s the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie? Everything seeks its own heightened version.”

— Don DeLillo

140. “It’s the kind of human junk that deepens the landscape, makes it sadder and lonelier and places a vague sad subjective regret at the edge of your response – not regret so much as a sense of time’s own esthetic, how strange and still and beautiful a chunk of concrete can be, lived in fleetingly and abandoned, the soul of wilderness signed by men and women passing through.”

— Don DeLillo

141. “I’m not just a college professor. I’m the head of a department. I don’t see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That’s for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are.”

— Don DeLillo

142. “Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”

— Don DeLillo

143. “If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.”

— Don DeLillo

144. “All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.”

— Don DeLillo

145. “You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal existence on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.”

— Don DeLillo

146. “To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don’t cling to you the way they do back home. You’re able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity.”

— Don DeLillo

147. “Look past the violence. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.”

— Don DeLillo

148. “There’s a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.”

— Don DeLillo

149. “You don’t think of the tape as boring or interesting. It is crude, it is blunt, it is relentless. It is the jostled part of your mind, the film that runs through your hotel brain under all the thoughts you know you’re thinking.”

— Don DeLillo

150. “Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?”

— Don DeLillo