Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfilment in America...”

— Don DeLillo

302. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

304. “At first it was only a nuisance. Now it’s a nuisance that threatens to become a way of life.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

310. “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

311. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

325. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

327. “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

328. “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

329. “People getting older become more fond of objects. I think this is true. Particular things. A leather-bound book, a piece of furniture, a photograph, a painting, the frame that holds the painting. These things make the past seem permanent. A baseball signed by a famous player, long dead. A simple coffee mug. Things we trust. They tell an important story. A person’s life, all those who entered and left, there’s a depth, a richness.”

— Don DeLillo

330. “Something lurked inside the truth.”

— Don DeLillo

331. “All this optimism, all this booming and soaring. Things happen like bang. This and that simultaneous. I put out my hand and what do I feel? I know there’s a thousand things you analyze every ten minutes. Patterns, ratios, indexes, whole maps of information. I love information. This is our sweetness and light. It’s a fuckall wonder. And we have meaning in the world. People eat and sleep in the shadow of what we do. But at the same time, what?”

— Don DeLillo

332. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

341. “I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives. That is not my head on someone else’s body in the photograph that’s introduced as evidence. I didn’t believe that nations play-act on a grand scale. I lived in the real.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

347. “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

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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