Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “The term itself – my life – is a desperate overstatement.”

— Don DeLillo

402. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “We yell and scold as a way of paying homage to each other’s views. This is the burden of friendship between extremely high-strung individuals.”

— Don DeLillo

408. “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

409. “If there is a secular equivalent of standing in a great spired Cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystic light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their little bedrooms fast asleep. Girls especially.”

— Don DeLillo

410. “It seems that danger assigns to public voices the responsibility of a rhythm, as if in metrical units there is a coherence we can use to balance whatever senseless and furious event is about to come rushing around our heads.”

— Don DeLillo

411. “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

412. “I’ve always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that’s where I belong, that’s where my work belongs.”

— Don DeLillo

413. “And what do you remember, finally, when everyone has gone home and the streets are empty of devotion and hope, swept by river wind? Is the memory thin and bitter and does it shame you with its fundamental untruth – all nuance and wishful silhouette? Or does the power of transcendence linger, the sense of an event that violates natural forces, something holy that throbs on the hot horizon, the vision you crave because you need a sign to stand against your doubt?”

— Don DeLillo

414. “There are two categories of writers, it could be said: The author who is just a voice, and the one who is also creating a picture. I belong to the latter, because I have an acute visual sense.”

— Don DeLillo

415. “It’s healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line. I assume you know that, he said.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

417. “World is supposed to mean something that’s self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.”

— Don DeLillo

418. “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

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. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

422. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

425. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

428. “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

429. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

433. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

437. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

445. “Solitude asks no pledges of anyone.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

447. “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

448. “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

449. “There’s less and less for people to talk to when they talk to me. I hope diminishing existence isn’t contagious.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo