Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “A sunset is the story of the world’s day.”

— Don DeLillo

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

406. “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

407. “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

408. “Miracles share the landscape with death.”

— Don DeLillo

409. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

411. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

413. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

424. “Solitude asks no pledges of anyone.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

436. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

438. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

442. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

446. “Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck. Things have no limits now. Money has no limits. I don’t understand money anymore. Money is undone. Violence is undone, violence is easier now, it’s uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

448. “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

449. “Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That’s why so many of them are in jail.”

— Don DeLillo

450. “Rushdie is a hostage.”

— Don DeLillo