Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

414. “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

415. “Solitude asks no pledges of anyone.”

— Don DeLillo

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

423. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

432. “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

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

— 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. “He had ambitions on my behalf and more or less at my expense. This is the custom among men who have failed to be heroes; their sons must prove that the seed was not impoverished.”

— Don DeLillo

437. “One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness.”

— Don DeLillo

438. “He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.”

— Don DeLillo

439. “I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.”

— Don DeLillo

440. “What terrorists gain, novelists lose.”

— Don DeLillo

441. “What’s the importance of a photograph if you know the writer’s work? But people still want the image, don’t they? The writer’s face is the surface of the work. It’s a clue to the mystery inside.”

— Don DeLillo

442. “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

443. “Rushdie is a hostage.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

445. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

447. “Too much engenders too much.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

449. “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

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

— Don DeLillo