Top 100 Don DeLillo Quotes
#1. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it's not that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing.
Don DeLillo
#2. If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
Don DeLillo
#3. The pattern match begins with a search for a substring of a given string that has a specified structure in the string manipulation language
Don DeLillo
#4. Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.
Don DeLillo
#5. Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination.
Don DeLillo
#6. The world is shrinking into a kind of technological funnel. I think people are drawn into their technological devices, and this becomes a kind of subjective universe, into which much of the rest of the world simply does not enter.
Don DeLillo
#7. 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
#8. A Greek will never say anything he hasn't already said a thousand times. Her husband Charles reprimanded me for not knowing the word. To Charles it was a mark of one's respect for other cultures to know the local terms of abuse and the words for sex acts and natural wastes.
Don DeLillo
#9. 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
#10. Like I'm a person and you're a person, which gives you the right to kill me.
Don DeLillo
#11. We're the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter.
Don DeLillo
#12. It's like World War III. Everything is white. They'll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort.
Don DeLillo
#13. It's impossible to write about the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath without taking note of twenty-five years of paranoia which has collected around that event.
Don DeLillo
#14. Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets.
Don DeLillo
#15. In a country that's in a hurry to make the future, the names attached to the products are an enduring reassurance.
Don DeLillo
#16. When he died he would not end. The world would end.
Don DeLillo
#17. It is just so interesting," he says at last. "The colors and all."
The colors and all.
Don DeLillo
#18. A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot ...
Don DeLillo
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. The novel is a fucking killer. I try to show it every respect.
Don DeLillo
#23. I am advising you in this matter not only as your chief of finance, but as a woman who would still be married to her husbands if they had looked at her the way you have looked at me here today.
Don DeLillo
#24. The nice thing about life is that it's filled with second chances. Quoting Bill.
Don DeLillo
#25. I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.
Don DeLillo
#26. That clean but lonely feeling when there are no other cars. The traffic lights changing just for you.
Don DeLillo
#27. The difference between the world of pictures and the world of printed matter is extraordinary and hard to define. A picture is like the masses: a multitude of impressions. A book on the other hand, with its linear advance of words and characters seems to be connected to individual identity.
Don DeLillo
#28. She was the one, I decided, who would guide me into the vortex of the cliche.
Don DeLillo
#29. This is not a story about your disappointment at my silence. The theme of this story is my pain and my attempts to end it.
Don DeLillo
#30. A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.
Don DeLillo
#31. Because we're suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information.
Don DeLillo
#32. Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.
Don DeLillo
#33. We still want what we want. We want a haircut.
Don DeLillo
#35. The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings.
Don DeLillo
#36. Why don't you want to be Jewish anymore?"
"I'm tired of the guilt. That enormous nagging historical guilt."
"What guilt?"
"The guilt of being innocent victims.
Don DeLillo
#37. How stupid these people were, coming into my office unarmed.
Don DeLillo
#38. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet's living billions.
Don DeLillo
#39. The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.
Don DeLillo
#40. Everyone wants to own the end of the world.
Don DeLillo
#41. Their bumper sticker read GUN CONTROL IS MIND CONTROL. In situations like this, you want to stick close to people in right-wing fringe groups.
Don DeLillo
#42. Only writing could soak up his loneliness and pain. Written words could tell him who he was.
Don DeLillo
#44. Helpless and fearful people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures, epic men who intimidate and darkly loom.
Don DeLillo
#45. Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.
Don DeLillo
#46. Terror is now the world narrative, unquestionably. When those two buildings were struck, and when they collapsed, it was, in effect, an extraordinary blow to consciousness, and it changed everything.
Don DeLillo
#47. The term itself - my life - is a desperate overstatement.
Don DeLillo
#48. A sunset is the story of the world's day.
Don DeLillo
#49. The mountains here contained a sense of time, geologic time. They lay in embryo, a process unfolding, or a shriveled dying perhaps. They had the look of naked events.
Don DeLillo
#50. It was not Death that stood before me but only Vernon Dickey, my father-in-law.
Don DeLillo
#51. Maybe this man experiences another kind of reality where he is here and there, before and after, and he moves from one to the other shatteringly, in a state of collapse, minus an identity, a language, a way to enjoy the savor of the honey-coated toast she watches him eat. She
Don DeLillo
#52. It's there in your face, all of it, the way it rarely shows in any face. what do i see? something lazy, sexy and insatiable.
Don DeLillo
#53. Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.
Don DeLillo
#54. There are no amateurs in the world of children.
Don DeLillo
#56. She was taking a round of medications, a mystical wheel, the ritualistic design of the hours and days in tablets and capsules, in colors, shapes and numbers.
Don DeLillo
#57. The game doesn't change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life.
Don DeLillo
#58. You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.
Don DeLillo
#59. I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.
Don DeLillo
#60. It referred to intense mental suffering, deep remorse, extreme anguish, acute sorrow and the like.
Don DeLillo
#61. If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word "identity" has reached an end.
Don DeLillo
#62. 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
#63. It is interesting ... how weapons reflect the soul of the maker.
Don DeLillo
#64. She lived just three blocks away, in a faded brick building whose limitations and malfunctions she'd come to understand as the texture of her life, to be distinguished from a normal day's complaints.
Don DeLillo
#65. The instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms.
Don DeLillo
#66. If this makes me sexier then where are you going?
Don DeLillo
#67. They passed out of the shade beneath the eaves and flew into sunglare and silence and it was an action she only partly saw, elusive and mutely beautiful, the birds so sunstruck they were consumed by light, disembodied, turned into something sheer and fleet and scatter-bright.
Don DeLillo
#68. You are the happy one. I am the doomed fool.
Don DeLillo
#69. This was worse than a retched nightmare. It was the nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder of the world
Don DeLillo
#70. It can't afford to be hard. it won't allow itself psychologically.
Don DeLillo
#71. We have to change truth a little in order to remember it.
Don DeLillo
#72. I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?
Don DeLillo
#74. This is death. I don't want it to tarry awhile so I can write a monograph. I want it to go away for seventy or eighty years.
Don DeLillo
#75. And I knew with total certainty that a protection factor of fifteen was the highest level of sunblock scientifically possible. Now they were selling me a thirty.
Don DeLillo
#76. It just means you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that.
Don DeLillo
#77. He'd come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain.
Don DeLillo
#78. To men at this remove, it is as though things exist in their particular physical form in order to reveal the hidden simplicity of some powerful mathematical truth.
Don DeLillo
#79. She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn't working.
Don DeLillo
#80. Was she naked?" Lasher said. "To the waist," Cotsakis said. "From which direction?" Lasher said.
Don DeLillo
#81. Sometimes it takes an entire morning to outlive a dream, to outwake a dream.
Don DeLillo
#82. I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.
Don DeLillo
#83. 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
#84. I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.
Don DeLillo
#85. There's just so much time set aside for baffled reaction. I believe we've reached the limit.
Don DeLillo
#86. The women kept washing floors. It seemed to be what they did in difficult times. Unvarying things, she saw, must have a deeper value than we know.
Don DeLillo
#87. A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.
Don DeLillo
#88. She is beginning to think it is possible that all creation is a spurt of blank matter that chances to make an emerald planet here, a dead star there, with random waste between.
Don DeLillo
#89. It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams
Don DeLillo
#90. I thought of women in other places, streets and boulevards in major cities, wind blowing, a woman's skirt lifting in the breeze, the way the wind tenses the skirt, giving shape to the legs, making the skirt dip between the legs, revealing knees and thighs. Were these my father's thoughts or mine?
Don DeLillo
#91. The falling away of things we carry around with us, twilight and chimney smoke.
Don DeLillo
#92. They know him at molecular level. He lives in them like chains of matter that determine who they are.
Don DeLillo
#93. The whole country's going to puke blood when they read it.
Don DeLillo
#94. The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.
Don DeLillo
#95. Ask yourself what it is you want more, to ease your ancient fear or to revenge your childish dopey injured male pride." I
Don DeLillo
#96. When I get real high I can feel the space between sounds.
Don DeLillo
#97. The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.
Don DeLillo
#98. It takes centuries to invent the primitive.
Don DeLillo
#99. That's what it all comes down to in the end,' he said. 'A person spends his life saying good-bye to other people. How does he say good-bye to himself?
Don DeLillo
#100. I don't want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.
Don DeLillo
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