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

252. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

256. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

260. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

264. “The dead have a presence.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

266. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

273. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

280. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

294. “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

295. “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

296. “Is it very different at home, or on the street, or waiting at the gate to board a flight? I maintain myself on the puppet drug of personal technology. Every touch of a button brings the neural rush of finding something I never knew and never needed to know until it appears at my anxious fingertips, where it remains for a shaky second before disappearing forever.”

— Don DeLillo

297. “You gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.”

— Don DeLillo

298. “The skies she retained in memory were dramas of cloud and sea storm, or the electric sheen before summer thunder in the city, always belonging to the energies of sheer weather, of what was out there, air masses, water vapor, westerlies.”

— Don DeLillo

299. “In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary from book to book. But in many books, there is a colloquialism of address. The characters will speak in a quite idiosyncratic way sometimes.”

— Don DeLillo

300. “I would think of it with affection because of its scenes of fragmentary beauty, because it brought men closer together through their perversity and fear, because it enabled us to pretend that death could be a tender experience, and because it breached the long silence.”

— Don DeLillo