Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

253. “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

254. “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

255. “Facts are lonely things.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

260. “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

261. “The truth of the world is exhausting.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

264. “She thought she understood the tourists. You travel somewhere not for museums and sunsets but for ruins, bombed-out terrain, for the moss-grown memory of war and torture.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

268. “The dead have a presence.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

272. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

277. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

285. “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

286. “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

287. “In the afternoon I drank Coke and wrote poetry.”

— Don DeLillo

288. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

296. “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

297. “It takes centuries to invent the primitive.”

— Don DeLillo

298. “When you try to unravel something you’ve written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.”

— Don DeLillo

299. “When hell fills up, the dead will walk the streets.”

— Don DeLillo

300. “Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.”

— Don DeLillo