Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence.”

— Don DeLillo

152. “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

153. “Off-camera lives are unverifiable.”

— Don DeLillo

154. “In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It’s everywhere and nowhere.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

156. “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

157. “I like old movies on television where a man lights a woman’s cigarette. That’s all they seemed to do in those old movies, the men and women. I’m normally so totally disregardless. But every time I see an old movie on television, I keep a sharp eye out for a man lighting a woman’s cigarette.”

— Don DeLillo

158. “It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.”

— Don DeLillo

159. “I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.”

— Don DeLillo

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “It is the neon epic of Saturday night.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

169. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

172. “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

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. “A band played live Muzak.”

— Don DeLillo

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

181. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

183. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

192. “The future belongs to crowds.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

194. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

196. “Fear is intense self-awareness.”

— Don DeLillo

197. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

199. “Words are not necessary to one’s experience of the true life.”

— Don DeLillo

200. “Rain turned to sleet, sleet to snow.”

— Don DeLillo