Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “We still want what we want. We want a haircut.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

418. “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

419. “Solitude asks no pledges of anyone.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

428. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

430. “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

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. “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

433. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

435. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

440. “In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that’s filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.”

— Don DeLillo

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

445. “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

446. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

449. “What terrorists gain, novelists lose.”

— Don DeLillo

450. “Rushdie is a hostage.”

— Don DeLillo