Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

366. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “I want to put your voice back inside your body, where it belongs.”

— Don DeLillo

386. “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

387. “To be a tourist is to escape accountability.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

389. “People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “He had a good vocabulary except when he was talking to someone.”

— Don DeLillo

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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