Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Off-camera lives are unverifiable.”

— Don DeLillo

152. “This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track.”

— Don DeLillo

153. “I realized the place was awash in noise. The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.”

— Don DeLillo

154. “It’s how the news becomes so powerful it doesn’t need TV or newspapers. It exists in people’s perceptions. It’s something they invent, strong enough to seem real. It’s the news without the media.”

— Don DeLillo

155. “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

156. “All who have their reward on Earth, the fruits Of painful superstition and blind zeal, Naught seeking but the praise of men, here find Fit retribution, empty as their deeds.”

— Don DeLillo

157. “A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn’t live his life in a certain way, this death is an introduction to an eternity of pain.”

— Don DeLillo

158. “He liked to mingle with shopping mall crowds. “I’m counting on you to tell me, Jack.” “Tell you what?” “You’re the only person I know that’s educated enough to give me the answer.” “The answer to what?” “Were people this dumb before television?” One.”

— Don DeLillo

159. “We’re a silver gleaming death machine!”

— Don DeLillo

160. “He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history – the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.”

— Don DeLillo

161. “By the time you listen to this, I’ll no longer remember what I said. I’ll be an old message by then, buried under many new messages. The machine makes everything a message, which narrows the range of discourse and destroys the poetry of nobody home. Home is a failed idea. People are no longer home or not home. They’re either picking up or not picking up.”

— Don DeLillo

162. “War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.”

— Don DeLillo

163. “In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.”

— Don DeLillo

164. “I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.”

— Don DeLillo

165. “People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night.”

— Don DeLillo

166. “Just because it’s on the radio doesn’t mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.”

— Don DeLillo

167. “A band played live Muzak.”

— Don DeLillo

168. “Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.”

— Don DeLillo

169. “I think literature has lost it’s power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.”

— Don DeLillo

170. “The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.”

— Don DeLillo

171. “When you see a thing like that, a thing that becomes a newsreel, you begin to feel you are a carrier of some solemn scrap of history.”

— Don DeLillo

172. “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

173. “Whatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you. Poetry kills you if you’re a poet, and so on. People choose their death whether they know it or not.”

— Don DeLillo

174. “He’d come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain.”

— Don DeLillo

175. “Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first.”

— Don DeLillo

176. “I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.”

— Don DeLillo

177. “All these people formed by language and climate and popular songs and breakfast foods and the jokes they tell and the cars they drive have never had anything in common so much as this, that they are sitting in the furrow of destruction.”

— Don DeLillo

178. “In the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape.”

— Don DeLillo

179. “Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.”

— Don DeLillo

180. “Some people don’t believe in God but they color eggs at Easter just to change the pattern of their days.”

— Don DeLillo

181. “Fear is intense self-awareness.”

— Don DeLillo

182. “Digital clocks took the ‘space’ out of time.”

— Don DeLillo

183. “She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn’t working.”

— Don DeLillo

184. “Being called a ‘bad citizen’ is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That’s exactly what we ought to do.”

— Don DeLillo

185. “He’d once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.”

— Don DeLillo

186. “The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.”

— Don DeLillo

187. “Explain me to myself, you’ll make me choke on my lunch. Feel sympathy for me, I’ll puke monkey blood on your understated shoes.”

— Don DeLillo

188. “All human existence is a trick of light.”

— Don DeLillo

189. “One must become a book before one can know what is inside it.”

— Don DeLillo

190. “Technology has become a force of nature. We can’t control it. It comes blowing over the planet and there’s nowhere for us to hide.”

— Don DeLillo

191. “What are the people like? Do the women wear plaid skirts, cable-knit sweaters? Are the men in hacking jackets? What’s a hacking jacket?” “They’ve grown comfortable with their money,” I said. “They genuinely believe they’re entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.” “I have trouble imagining death at that income level,” she said. “Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.”

— Don DeLillo

192. “Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your causal gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves of identity and being. There are no amateurs in the world of children.”

— Don DeLillo

193. “The world isn’t going to be destroyed, but you don’t feel safe anymore in your plane or train or office or auditorium.”

— Don DeLillo

194. “There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can’t experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.”

— Don DeLillo

195. “When times are bad, people feel compelled to overeat.”

— Don DeLillo

196. “Writing is an organized way of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write them.”

— Don DeLillo

197. “To have true socialism, he said, we first establish capitalism, totally and heartlessly, and then destroy it by degrees, bury it in the sea.”

— Don DeLillo

198. “Everyone wants to own the end of the world.”

— Don DeLillo

199. “The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.”

— Don DeLillo

200. “When he died he would not end. The world would end.”

— Don DeLillo