Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

403. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

405. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

407. “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

408. “I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

410. “Maybe it was the hip-sprung way she moved, high-assed and shiny, alert to surfaces, like a character in a B movie soaked in alimony and gin.”

— Don DeLillo

411. “When I get real high I can feel the space between sounds.”

— Don DeLillo

412. “Her sweat is a rank reminder, the only one, that she exists, that she is separate from the things that surround her.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

414. “Money was spiritual indemnity against some unspecifiable future loss. It existed in purest form in his mind, my money, a reinforcing source of meditation.”

— Don DeLillo

415. “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

416. “Is a cardigan what women wear when they don’t want to talk about themselves?”

— Don DeLillo

417. “We need time to lose interest in things.”

— Don DeLillo

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.”

— Don DeLillo

422. “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

423. “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

424. “The grasp of objects that bind us to some betokening.”

— Don DeLillo

425. “Self-pity oozed through my soul. I tried to relax and enjoy it.”

— Don DeLillo

426. “Solitude asks no pledges of anyone.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

428. “The nice thing about life is that it’s filled with second chances. Quoting Bill.”

— Don DeLillo

429. “Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be.”

— Don DeLillo

430. “It was May of my senior year at Leighton Gage and on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons we sat in an air-conditioned hourglass and savored our own total incomprehension as an assistant professor charted the poems of Dryden, Lovelace, Fanshawe and Suckling. They were all so incomparably dead, the Penguin poets, and we loved them because their lines meant less to us than the dark side of the moon.”

— Don DeLillo

431. “People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child’s mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

433. “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

434. “We still want what we want. We want a haircut.”

— Don DeLillo

435. “We drove in silence behind a motorboat being towed by a black pickup. I thought of his remarks about matter and being, those long nights on the deck, half smashed, he and I, transcendence, paroxysm, the end of human consciousness. It seemed so much dead echo now. Point omega. A million years away. The omega point has narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as it enters a body. All the man’s grand themes funneled down to local grief, one body, out there somewhere, or not.”

— Don DeLillo

436. “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

437. “I felt the distance and stillness of that sprawled dawn like some endless sky waking inside me, flared against the laughter.”

— Don DeLillo

438. “The falling away of things we carry around with us, twilight and chimney smoke.”

— Don DeLillo

439. “That’s what in theory differentiates a writer from everyone else. You see and hear more clearly.”

— Don DeLillo

440. “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

441. “I’ve never made an outline for any novel that I’ve written. Never.”

— Don DeLillo

442. “At breakfast, Babette read all our horoscopes aloud, using her storytelling voice. I tried not to listen when she got to mine, although I think I wanted to listen, I think I sought some clues.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

444. “I would never write in response to what I believe the public wanted or needed.”

— Don DeLillo

445. “American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.”

— Don DeLillo

446. “The self. What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?”

— Don DeLillo

447. “A police car went by with its siren going, a rotary slurping noise, it sounded like the blender in their kitchen – she made fruit shakes compulsively that they felt morally bound to drink.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

449. “It’s healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line.”

— Don DeLillo

450. “How do we stand with others when the things that separate us are imposed at birth, when the separation haunts us and follows us day and night?”

— Don DeLillo