Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “Everything’s a scandal. Dying’s a scandal. But we all do it.”

— Don DeLillo

204. “The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

206. “If Greek and Latin characters are paving stones, Arabic is rain.”

— Don DeLillo

207. “Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.”

— Don DeLillo

208. “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

209. “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

210. “Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.”

— Don DeLillo

211. “I never wanted to change the world.”

— Don DeLillo

212. “When I work, I’m just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that’s not familiar. But I’m not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.”

— Don DeLillo

213. “In the dark the mind runs on like a devouring machine, the only thing awake in the universe.”

— Don DeLillo

214. “This was worse than a retched nightmare. It was the nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder of the world.”

— Don DeLillo

215. “The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.”

— Don DeLillo

216. “Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure.”

— Don DeLillo

217. “Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”

— Don DeLillo

218. “The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now.”

— Don DeLillo

219. “The game doesn’t change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life.”

— Don DeLillo

220. “Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.”

— Don DeLillo

221. “Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

223. “Plot a murder, you’re saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

225. “A word is also a picture of a word.”

— Don DeLillo

226. “Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.”

— Don DeLillo

227. “Is he one of them now? Frustrated, stuck, self-watching, looking for a means of connection, a way to break out. After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.”

— Don DeLillo

228. “Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.”

— Don DeLillo

229. “Catastrophe is our bedtime story.”

— Don DeLillo

230. “How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?”

— Don DeLillo

231. “He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.”

— Don DeLillo

232. “Decorative gestures add romance to a life.”

— Don DeLillo

233. “She was transcribing names and phone numbers from an old book to a new one. There were no addresses. Her friends had phone numbers only, a race of people with a seven-bit analog consciousness.”

— Don DeLillo

234. “I embarked on my life – I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation.”

— Don DeLillo

235. “Facts are lonely things.”

— Don DeLillo

236. “The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.”

— Don DeLillo

237. “We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.”

— Don DeLillo

238. “I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.”

— Don DeLillo

239. “Terror is now the world narrative, unquestionably. When those two buildings were struck, and when they collapsed, it was, in effect, an extraordinary blow to consciousness, and it changed everything.”

— Don DeLillo

240. “The dead have a presence.”

— Don DeLillo

241. “We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. 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

242. “I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread.”

— Don DeLillo

243. “If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we’re talking about when we use the word “identity” has reached an end.”

— Don DeLillo

244. “Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.”

— Don DeLillo

245. “It’s hard to be beautiful. You have an obligation to people. You almost become public property. You can lose yourself and get almost mentally disturbed on just the public nature of being beautiful. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. You can get completely lost in that whole dumb mess. And anyway who’s to say what’s beautiful and what’s ugly?”

— Don DeLillo

246. “If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.”

— Don DeLillo

247. “These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of species. What could be more useless than a man who couldn’t fix a dripping faucet – fundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes? I wasn’t sure I disagreed.”

— Don DeLillo

248. “What’s the point of living if we don’t die at the end of it?”

— Don DeLillo

249. “True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.”

— Don DeLillo

250. “The language of my books has shaped me as a man.”

— Don DeLillo