Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “Fear is intense self-awareness.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

215. “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

216. “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

217. “Everything is supposed to be something. But it never is. That’s the nature of existence.”

— Don DeLillo

218. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

221. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

223. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

225. “Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

231. “I am the false character that follows the name around.”

— Don DeLillo

232. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

233. “What about the Americans?” “Eerie people. Genetically engineered to play squash and work weekends.”

— Don DeLillo

234. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

236. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

239. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

240. “Facts are lonely things.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

242. “It makes a man feel universal, floating over the continents, seeing the rim of the world, a line as clear as a compass arc, knowing it is just a turning of the bend to Atlantic twilight, to sediment plumes and kelp beds, an island chain glowing in the dusky sea.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

244. “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

245. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

247. “Catastrophe is our bedtime story.”

— Don DeLillo

248. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

250. “The dead have a presence.”

— Don DeLillo