Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “This is the custom among men who have failed to be heroes; their sons must prove that the seed was not impoverished.”

— Don DeLillo

302. “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

303. “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

304. “There were moments when she wasn’t talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.”

— Don DeLillo

305. “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

306. “I feel artificially myself. I’m someone who’s supposed to be me.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

308. “There is a seaward bulge of stratocumulus. Sun glint and littoral drift. I see blooms of plankton in a blue of such Persian richness it seems an animal rapture, a colour change to express some form of intuitive delight.”

— Don DeLillo

309. “I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?”

— Don DeLillo

310. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

312. “You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.”

— Don DeLillo

313. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

315. “As though in her heart she was not a travel writer at all, as her mother had said she wished to be, but simply a traveler, in the purer form, someone who collects impressions, dense anatomies of feeling, but does not care to record them.”

— Don DeLillo

316. “In the Times every morning, wasn’t it a fact that the obits and the ad column tended to appear on facing pages?”

— Don DeLillo

317. “Mainly we looked at people in other cars, trying to work out from their faces how frightened we should be.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

319. “You live in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God.”

— Don DeLillo

320. “We travel into or away from our photographs.”

— Don DeLillo

321. “What ambiguity there is in exalted things. We despise them a little.”

— Don DeLillo

322. “It’s my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I’ve written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don’t know.”

— Don DeLillo

323. “The words were old and true, full of reassurance, comfort, consolation. Men followed such words to their death because other men before them had done the same, and perhaps it was easier to die than admit that words could lose their meaning.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

325. “The mountains here contained a sense of time, geologic time. They lay in embryo, a process unfolding, or a shriveled dying perhaps. They had the look of naked events.”

— Don DeLillo

326. “There’s never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President.”

— Don DeLillo

327. “The ceiling angled down right over me and I raised my arm and touched it with my fingertips. All children, I thought, should be permitted to sleep in such a room; the child loves nooks and odd angles and is frightened into nightmare by equidistance, by parallel planes which conceal nothing.”

— Don DeLillo

328. “People say great art is immortal. I say there’s something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.”

— Don DeLillo

329. “If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

331. “There were no laptops or handheld devices in class. Ilgauskas didn’t exclude them; we did, sort of, unspokenly. Some of us could barely complete a thought without touch pads or scroll buttons, but we understood that high-speed data systems did not belong here. They were an assault on the environment, which was defined by length, width, and depth, with time drawn out, computed in heartbeats.”

— Don DeLillo

332. “If you let me teach you not to end a sentence with a preposition, Edgar thought, I will save your life.”

— Don DeLillo

333. “I had not yet learned to appreciate the slowly gliding drift of identical things; chunks of time spun past me like meteorites in a universe predicated on repetition.”

— Don DeLillo

334. “She is the kind of of child who feels a protective tenderness towards her own beginnings. It is part of her strategy in a world of displacements to make every effort to restore and preserve, keep things together for their value as remembering objects, a way of fastening herself to a life.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

336. “Something lurked inside the truth.”

— Don DeLillo

337. “If you could stretch a given minute, what would you find between its unstuck components? Probably some kind of astral madness. A bleak comprehension of the final size of things.”

— Don DeLillo

338. “News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before – what? I don’t know. But you’re smart to trap us in your camera before we disappear.”

— Don DeLillo

339. “History is the angle at which realities meet.”

— Don DeLillo

340. “When we reached the sidewalk, a lovely teen-age girl wearing pink eyelashes asked me for my autograph. “I don’t know who you are,” she said, “but I’m sure you must be somebody.”

— Don DeLillo

341. “Perhaps we’ve invented conspiracies for our own psychic well-being, to heal ourselves.”

— Don DeLillo

342. “Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.”

— Don DeLillo

343. “I’ve always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that’s where I belong, that’s where my work belongs.”

— Don DeLillo

344. “My attitudes aren’t directed toward characters at all. I don’t feel sympathetic toward some characters, unsympathetic toward others. I don’t love some characters, feel contempt for others. They have attitudes; I don’t.”

— Don DeLillo

345. “I thought of women in other places, streets and boulevards in major cities, wind blowing, a woman’s skirt lifting in the breeze, the way the wind tenses the skirt, giving shape to the legs, making the skirt dip between the legs, revealing knees and thighs. Were these my father’s thoughts or mine?”

— Don DeLillo

346. “It seems that danger assigns to public voices the responsibility of a rhythm, as if in metrical units there is a coherence we can use to balance whatever senseless and furious event is about to come rushing around our heads.”

— Don DeLillo

347. “She was taking a round of medications, a mystical wheel, the ritualistic design of the hours and days in tablets and capsules, in colors, shapes and numbers.”

— Don DeLillo

348. “We commit our crimes at night and reveal ourselves in the high noon of studio lights.”

— Don DeLillo

349. “To men at this remove, it is as though things exist in their particular physical form in order to reveal the hidden simplicity of some powerful mathematical truth.”

— Don DeLillo

350. “I think pleasure is in the moment more than in the thing.”

— Don DeLillo