Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 7 of 10

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

— Don DeLillo

302. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

307. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

313. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

316. “He tried to read his way into sleep but only grew more wakeful. He read science and poetry. He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper. Poems made him conscious of his breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice.”

— Don DeLillo

317. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

319. “You understand it’s not a matter of strategy. I’m not talking about secrets or deceptions. I’m talking about being yourself. If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things the others don’t know. It’s what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”

— Don DeLillo

320. “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

321. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

323. “Certainly I’ve never tried to imagine what the future will hold. It’s a hopeless endeavor to try to do such a thing...”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

325. “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

326. “I’d never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be “only human,” subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief.”

— Don DeLillo

327. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

329. “Something lurked inside the truth.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

332. “I think that the massive, overarching, interconnected systems of technology tend to make us a little insecure, somewhat pliable, and susceptible to half-beliefs.”

— Don DeLillo

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “This is what love comes down to, things that happen and what we say about them.”

— Don DeLillo

337. “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

338. “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

339. “Then she rubbed the cat’s fur and felt her childhood there. It was complete in a touch, everything intact, carried out of old lost houses and fields and summer days into the river of her hand.”

— Don DeLillo

340. “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

341. “Marriage is something we make from available materials. In this sense, it’s improvised, it’s almost offhand. Maybe this is why we know so little about it. It’s too inspired and quicksilver a thing to be clearly understood. Two people make a blur.”

— Don DeLillo

342. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

344. “Money was spiritual indemnity against some unspecifiable future loss. It existed in purest form in his mind, my money, a reinforcing source of meditation.”

— Don DeLillo

345. “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

346. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

348. “Years after I’d seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts.”

— Don DeLillo

349. “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

350. “Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war.”

— Don DeLillo