Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Mainly we looked at people in other cars, trying to work out from their faces how frightened we should be.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

358. “Secrets are an exalted state, almost a dream state. They’re a way of arresting motion, stopping the world so we can see ourselves in it.”

— Don DeLillo

359. “Through history it’s the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist?”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

367. “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

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. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.”

— Don DeLillo

380. “Once you start a file, Delphine, it’s just a matter of time before the material comes pouring in. Notes, lists, photos, rumors. Every bit and piece and whisper in the world that doesn’t have a life until someone comes along to collect it. It’s all been waiting just for you.”

— Don DeLillo

381. “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

382. “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

383. “We’re a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.”

— Don DeLillo

384. “We yell and scold as a way of paying homage to each other’s views. This is the burden of friendship between extremely high-strung individuals.”

— Don DeLillo

385. “I needed death in order to believe I was living, an atmosphere of death much more real and personal than anything the newspapers can offer.”

— Don DeLillo

386. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

388. “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

389. “There is a thing about the trust of a dog that makes up for a lot of heartache we take in this life.”

— Don DeLillo

390. “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

391. “And what do you remember, finally, when everyone has gone home and the streets are empty of devotion and hope, swept by river wind? Is the memory thin and bitter and does it shame you with its fundamental untruth – all nuance and wishful silhouette? Or does the power of transcendence linger, the sense of an event that violates natural forces, something holy that throbs on the hot horizon, the vision you crave because you need a sign to stand against your doubt?”

— Don DeLillo

392. “It’s healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line. I assume you know that, he said.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

395. “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

396. “The only problem I had was that my whole life was a lesson in the effect of echoes, that I was living in the third person.”

— Don DeLillo

397. “Memory is the faculty of absolution. Men developed memories to ease their disquiet over things they did as men. The deep past is the only innocence and therefore necessary to retain.”

— Don DeLillo

398. “We create beautiful and lasting things, build vast civilizations.” “Gorgeous evasions,” he said. “Great escapes.”

— Don DeLillo

399. “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

400. “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