Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I never wanted to change the world.”

— Don DeLillo

202. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

205. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

208. “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

209. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

213. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

216. “Facts are lonely things.”

— Don DeLillo

217. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

219. “The future belongs to crowds.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

222. “Catastrophe is our bedtime story.”

— Don DeLillo

223. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

233. “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

234. “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

235. “The dead have a presence.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

237. “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

238. “When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards.”

— Don DeLillo

239. “The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become.”

— Don DeLillo

240. “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

241. “Sometimes it takes an entire morning to outlive a dream, to outwake a dream.”

— Don DeLillo

242. “The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence. Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God.”

— Don DeLillo

243. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

246. “Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera? Because our lives are a vivid situation.”

— Don DeLillo

247. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

249. “In the countryside he heard horns and drums and followed the sound to a temple of granite and marble set in a compound that included shrines and incense stalls, people squatting against the walls, beggars, touts, flower-sellers, those who watch over your shoes for a couple of weightless coins.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo