Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “It’s healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line. I assume you know that, he said.”

— Don DeLillo

352. “The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It’s a moment never to be thought of except when it’s in the process of unfolding. Maybe this is why it doesn’t seem peculiar. It is only me. I don’t think about it. I simply live within it and then leave it behind.”

— Don DeLillo

353. “Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world.”

— Don DeLillo

354. “The whole country’s going to puke blood when they read it.”

— Don DeLillo

355. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

361. “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

362. “The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.”

— Don DeLillo

363. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

365. “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

366. “World is supposed to mean something that’s self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.”

— Don DeLillo

367. “They’ve grown comfortable with their money,’ I said. ‘They genuinely believe they’re entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.”

— Don DeLillo

368. “I’ll tell you what it means, these orbiting sensors that can hear us in our beds. It means the end of loyalty. The more complex the systems, the less conviction in people. Conviction will be drained out of us. Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant.”

— Don DeLillo

369. “Is cyberspace a thing within the world or is it the other way around? Which contains the other, and how can you tell for sure?”

— Don DeLillo

370. “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

371. “I was not a happy runner. I did it to stay interested in my body, to stay informed, and to set up clear lines of endeavor, a standard to meet, a limit to stay within. I was just enough of a puritan to think there must be some virtue in rigorous things, although I was careful not to overdo it. I never wore the clothes. the shorts, tank top, high socks. Just running shoes and a lightweight shirt and jeans. I ran disguised as an ordinary person.”

— Don DeLillo

372. “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

373. “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

374. “She was the one, I decided, who would guide me into the vortex of the cliche.”

— Don DeLillo

375. “Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.”

— Don DeLillo

376. “Everyone was a spook or dupe or asset, a double, courier, cutout or defector, or was related to one. We were all linked in a vast and rhythmic coincidence, a daisy chain of rumor, suspicion and secret wish.”

— Don DeLillo

377. “There are two categories of writers, it could be said: The author who is just a voice, and the one who is also creating a picture. I belong to the latter, because I have an acute visual sense.”

— Don DeLillo

378. “Writers, some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren’t noticed in the way that a writer might notice.”

— Don DeLillo

379. “I’m a novelist, period. An American novelist.”

— Don DeLillo

380. “He found his cigar smoldering in an ashtray on the liquor cabinet and he fired it up again. The aroma gave him a sense of robust health. He smelled well-being, long life, even placid fatherhood, somewhere, in the burning leaf.”

— Don DeLillo

381. “In a country that’s in a hurry to make the future, the names attached to the products are an enduring reassurance.”

— Don DeLillo

382. “It is only me, the body in the shower, one person enclosed in plastic watching a drop of water skate down the wet curtain. The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It is a moment never to be thought of except when it is in the process of unfolding.”

— Don DeLillo

383. “There are times when you want to stop working at faith and just be washed in a blowing wind that tells you everything.”

— Don DeLillo

384. “If there is a secular equivalent of standing in a great spired Cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystic light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their little bedrooms fast asleep. Girls especially.”

— Don DeLillo

385. “You don’t know the connection? You don’t know that every privilege in your life and every thought in your mind depends on the ability of the two great powers to hang a threat over the planet?”

— Don DeLillo

386. “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

387. “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

388. “I’m at that certain stage in a night of drinking and talking when I see things clearly through a small opening, a window in space.”

— Don DeLillo

389. “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

390. “She was shining a light on us, she was coming into being, endlessly being formed and reformed as the muscles in her face worked at smiling and speaking, as the electronic dots swarmed.”

— Don DeLillo

391. “If an idea seems to find its way towards a stage setting, that’s the direction I take. I don’t know if I’m trying to achieve anything other than to follow an idea on to the page.”

— Don DeLillo

392. “A novel determines its own size and shape and I’ve never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require.”

— Don DeLillo

393. “I understood that he did not see the person he was talking to. He had the drifter’s inclination to be impervious to names and faces. These were interchangeable components room to room, country to country. He did not talk so much as narrate. He traced a wavy line, his, and there was usually someone willing to be the random body that he told his stories to.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

395. “Isolation is not a drawback to those who understand that isolation is the point.” I.”

— Don DeLillo

396. “If your child thinks you’re guilty of something, right or wrong, then you’re guilty.”

— Don DeLillo

397. “It’s true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.”

— Don DeLillo

398. “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

399. “But idealists of course are unpredictable. They tend to be the ones who turn bitter overnight, deceived by lies they’ve told themselves.”

— Don DeLillo

400. “Is this a mild winter or a harsh winter?”

— Don DeLillo