Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “I was never either pro-culture or counter-culture. I was in a kind of middle state.”

— Don DeLillo

252. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

255. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

258. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

266. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

268. “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

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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

282. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

284. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

286. “Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We don’t need God or miracles or the flight of the bumble bee. But it is also crouched and undecidable. It can go either way.”

— Don DeLillo

287. “You knew her for years and I knew her for minutes. It comes to the same thing. These matters have to be assessed in the light of eternity.”

— Don DeLillo

288. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

291. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

293. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

295. “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

296. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

299. “I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he’ll become.”

— Don DeLillo

300. “Isn’t death the boundary we need?”

— Don DeLillo