Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “What’s the point of living if we don’t die at the end of it?”

— Don DeLillo

252. “I tell myself I have reached an age, the age of unreliable menace. The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.”

— Don DeLillo

253. “Freud is finished, Einstein’s next.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

255. “I was never either pro-culture or counter-culture. I was in a kind of middle state.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

258. “Everyone was a spook or dupe or asset, a double, courier, cutout or defector, or was related to one. We were all linked in a vast and rhythmic coincidence, a daisy chain of rumor, suspicion and secret wish.”

— Don DeLillo

259. “Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into the night, if you stand a while and look.”

— Don DeLillo

260. “Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals.”

— Don DeLillo

261. “Talent is everything; sanity is nothing.”

— Don DeLillo

262. “How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?”

— Don DeLillo

263. “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

264. “I am very unmusical. I can’t carry a tune. I would never be able to play an instrument.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

266. “Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.”

— Don DeLillo

267. “I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

269. “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

270. “At first it was only a nuisance. Now it’s a nuisance that threatens to become a way of life.”

— Don DeLillo

271. “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

272. “Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.”

— Don DeLillo

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

273. “It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at.”

— Don DeLillo

274. “How memory conspires with objects of human craft, pressing time flat, inciting a tender reminiscence.”

— Don DeLillo

275. “Isn’t death a blessing? Doesn’t it define the value of our lives, minute to minute, year to year?”

— Don DeLillo

276. “For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set.”

— Don DeLillo

277. “People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.”

— Don DeLillo

278. “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

279. “Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.”

— Don DeLillo

280. “Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.”

— Don DeLillo

281. “This is the custom among men who have failed to be heroes; their sons must prove that the seed was not impoverished.”

— Don DeLillo

282. “Do we have to believe something happened exactly the way it was shown by artists?”

— Don DeLillo

283. “The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it.”

— Don DeLillo

284. “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

285. “At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn’t see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her.”

— Don DeLillo

286. “I don’t want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.”

— Don DeLillo

287. “I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people’s sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.”

— Don DeLillo

288. “What do children know? They know who they are, she said, in ways we can’t know and they can’t tell us.”

— Don DeLillo

289. “I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.”

— Don DeLillo

290. “Consume or die. That’s the mandate of the culture. And it all ends up in the dump. We make stupendous amounts of garbage, then we react to it, not only technologically but in our hearts and minds. We let it shape us. We let it control our thinking. Garbage comes first, then we build a system to deal with it.”

— Don DeLillo

291. “Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now.”

— Don DeLillo

292. “I’ve come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.”

— Don DeLillo

293. “Maybe this man experiences another kind of reality where he is here and there, before and after, and he moves from one to the other shatteringly, in a state of collapse, minus an identity, a language, a way to enjoy the savor of the honey-coated toast she watches him eat. She.”

— Don DeLillo

294. “When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.”

— Don DeLillo

295. “I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfilment in America...”

— Don DeLillo

296. “She watched him surrender his crisp gaze to a softening, a bright-eyed fear that seemed to tunnel out of childhood. It had the starkness of a last prayer. She worked to get at it. His face was drained and slack, coming into flatness, into black and white, cracked lips and flaring brows, age lines that hinge the chin, old bafflements and regrets.”

— Don DeLillo

297. “It was only when I found myself writing things I didn’t realise I knew that I said, ‘I’m a writer now.’”

— Don DeLillo

298. “Once, probably, I used to think that vagueness was a loftier kind of poetry, truer to the depths of consciousness, and maybe when I started to read mathematics and science back in the mid-70s I found an unexpected lyricism in the necessarily precise language that scientists tend to use My instinct, my superstition is that the closer I see a thing and the more accurately I describe it, the better my chances of arriving at a certain sensuality of expression.”

— Don DeLillo

299. “He was waiting for a man with a knife to come out of a doorway at him. All this time, he told me, he had been trying to steal death from her body. By confronting it himself, he would keep it away from her.”

— Don DeLillo

300. “I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it’s enough to make me proud to be an American.”

— Don DeLillo