Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Isn’t death the boundary we need?”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

306. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

309. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

311. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

317. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

320. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

322. “Something lurked inside the truth.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

339. “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

340. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

347. “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

348. “The pattern match begins with a search for a substring of a given string that has a specified structure in the string manipulation language.”

— Don DeLillo

349. “The TV was a rage-making machine, working at him all the time, giving him direction and scope, enlarging him in a sense, filling him with a world rage, a great stalking soreness and rancour.”

— Don DeLillo

350. “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