Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Talent is everything; sanity is nothing.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

261. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

264. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

272. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

281. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

284. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

286. “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

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. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

294. “I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books.”

— Don DeLillo

295. “It’s the things we forget about that tell us who we are.”

— Don DeLillo

296. “We’re not gonna die We’re not gonna die We’re not gonna die, leading them in a chant, a mantra that was joyful and mock joyful at the same time because this is New York, New York and we want it both ways.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

298. “To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity. It seemed a worthwhile goal for prospective saints and flagellants. The new asceticism. All the visionary possibilities of the fast. To feed on the plants and animals of earth. To expand and wallow. I cherished his size, the formlessness of it, the sheer vulgar pleasure, his sense of being overwritten prose. Somehow it was the opposite of death.”

— Don DeLillo

299. “We listen to the old radio shows. Light flares and spreads across the blue-banded edge, sunrise, sunset, the urban grids in shadow. There is a sweetness in the tenor voice of the young man singing, a simple vigour that time and distance and random noise have enveloped in eloquence and yearning. Every sound, every lilt of strings has this veneer of age.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo