Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— 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. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “A sunset is the story of the world’s day.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

364. “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

365. “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

366. “Miracles share the landscape with death.”

— Don DeLillo

367. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

369. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

371. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

381. “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

382. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

384. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

397. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

399. “There’s a dolphin’s brain in my in-box but come see me in forty-eight hours.”

— Don DeLillo

400. “The book was a challenge, a secondhand paperback crammed with huge and violent emotions in small crowded type on waterlogged pages.”

— Don DeLillo