Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

405. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

413. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

417. “He tried to read his way into sleep but only grew more wakeful. He read science and poetry. He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper. Poems made him conscious of his breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice.”

— Don DeLillo

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

421. “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

422. “At first it was only a nuisance. Now it’s a nuisance that threatens to become a way of life.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

429. “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

430. “Too much engenders too much.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

433. “Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror. Today, the men who shape and inflence human consciousness are the terrorists.”

— Don DeLillo

434. “Shoes are like people. They adjust to situations.”

— Don DeLillo

435. “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

436. “I feel like an overwritten paragraph.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

438. “Consume or die. That’s the mandate of the culture. And it all ends up in the dump. We make stupendous amounts of garbage, then we react to it, not only technologically but in our hearts and minds. We let it shape us. We let it control our thinking. Garbage comes first, then we build a system to deal with it.”

— Don DeLillo

439. “Don’t you sometimes feel a power in you? An extreme state of good health. An arrogant healthiness. That’s it. You are feeling so good you begin thinking you’re a little superior to most people. An optimism about yourself that you generate at the expense of others. Don’t you sometimes feel this?”

— Don DeLillo

440. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

443. “There is no lie in war or preparation of war that can’t be defended.”

— Don DeLillo

444. “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

445. “He was a foreigner here. There was no profit in discontent. He could not apply his bitterness. It was American-made and had no local standing. For the first time he realized what a dangerous thing he’d done, leaving his country. He struggled against this awareness. He hated knowing something he didn’t want to know.”

— Don DeLillo

446. “Bemoan technology all you want. It expands your self-esteem and connects you in your well-pressed suit to the things that slip through the world otherwise unperceived.”

— Don DeLillo

447. “Some good-bad nights I spent, loving my self-hatred.”

— Don DeLillo

448. “When I work I have a sculptor’s sense of the shape of the words I’m making. I use a machine with larger than average letters: the bigger the better.”

— Don DeLillo

449. “I’ve always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.”

— Don DeLillo

450. “Even at a distance, her mouth showed the small pursed conceit of a remark in the making.”

— Don DeLillo