Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “If you let me teach you not to end a sentence with a preposition, Edgar thought, I will save your life.”

— Don DeLillo

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

371. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

379. “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

380. “His stillness was commanding. I felt myself getting whiter by the second. What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in? I was scared to the marrow. I was cold and hot, dry and wet, myself and someone else. The fist clenched in my chest. I went to the staircase and sat on the top step, looking into my hands. So much remained. Every word and thing a beadwork of bright creation.”

— Don DeLillo

381. “Miracles share the landscape with death.”

— Don DeLillo

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

385. “The term itself – my life – is a desperate overstatement.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

400. “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