Top 100 Delillo's Quotes
#1. Don DeLillo's 'White Noise,' which I read when I was 19. It showed me that a book can be funny as hell and deadly serious.
Kevin Barry
#2. I guess of all those novels, Don DeLillo's Falling Man is the one I like the best. I thought there were some beautiful things in that, particularly the relationship between the man who finds the briefcase and the woman whose husband owned the briefcase. It's quite a beautiful passage.
Paul Auster
#3. When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.
Don DeLillo
#4. It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture.
Don DeLillo
#5. My books - I kid you not - are very often shelved between DeLillo and de Sade. Which not only completely cracks me up, but it seems like an encouraging message from the universe: between those two, there's a lot of wiggle room. I feel just fine there.
Stacey D'Erasmo
#6. Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong. (Point Omega)
Don DeLillo
#7. When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear.
Don DeLillo
#8. I like old movies on television where a man lights a woman's cigarette. That's all they seemed to do in those old movies, the men and women. I'm normally so totally disregardless. But every time I see an old movie on television, I keep a sharp eye out for a man lighting a woman's cigarette.
Don DeLillo
#9. I'm not just a college professor. I'm the head of a department. I don't see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That's for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are.
Don DeLillo
#10. 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
#11. In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere.
Don DeLillo
#12. One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.
Don DeLillo
#13. It's how the news becomes so powerful it doesn't need TV or newspapers. It exists in people's perceptions. It's something they invent, strong enough to seem real. It's the news without the media.
Don DeLillo
#14. In the middle of it all is Hitler, of course."
"He was on again last night."
"He's always on. We couldn't have television without him.
Don DeLillo
#15. Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S. Why not use it?
Don DeLillo
#16. Marriage is something we make from available materials. In this sense, it's improvised, it's almost offhand. Maybe this is why we know so little about it. It's too inspired and quicksilver a thing to be clearly understood. Two people make a blur.
Don DeLillo
#17. There's a dolphin's brain in my in-box but come see me in forty-eight hours.
Don DeLillo
#18. Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.
Don DeLillo
#19. I'll tell you what surprises me."
"Is it my eyes? Is it my lips?"
"It's your cat," he said.
"I don't have a cat."
"That's what surprises me."
"You think I'm a cat person."
"I see you with a cat, definitely. There ought to be a cat slipping along the walls.
Don DeLillo
#20. At first it was only a nuisance. Now it's a nuisance that threatens to become a way of life.
Don DeLillo
#21. Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.
Don DeLillo
#22. Words are not necessary to one's experience of the true life.
Don DeLillo
#23. 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
#24. A sunset is the story of the world's day.
Don DeLillo
#25. He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.
Don DeLillo
#26. America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.
Don DeLillo
#27. I like your mother. you have your mother's breasts."
"her breasts."
"great stand-up tits." he said
Don DeLillo
#28. Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.
Don DeLillo
#29. WYATT: What kind of sound waves?
DR. BAZELON: Tapes of the cries of baby mice. This sound reaches a level of forty thousand cycles per second. It's the purest thing in nature.
Don DeLillo
#30. Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself.
Don DeLillo
#31. The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?
Don DeLillo
#32. That night, after the movie, driving my father's car along the country roads, I began to wonder how real the landscape truly was, and how much of a dream is a dream.
Don DeLillo
#33. 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
#34. I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.
Don DeLillo
#35. Let's enjoy the aimless days while we still can.
Don DeLillo
#36. People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.
Don DeLillo
#37. America was and is the immigrant's dream.
Don DeLillo
#38. There's just so much time set aside for baffled reaction. I believe we've reached the limit.
Don DeLillo
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. My favorite sports novel is End Zone by Delillo. It's such a great looking book too, the black cover with the football player on it. It's just a fantastic little book.
Chad Harbach
#42. Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.
Don DeLillo
#43. If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.
Don DeLillo
#44. 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
#45. There's less and less for people to talk to when they talk to me. I hope diminishing existence isn't contagious.
Don DeLillo
#46. The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It's a moment never to be thought of except when it's in the process of unfolding. Maybe this is why it doesn't seem peculiar. It is only me. I don't think about it. I simply live within it and then leave it behind.
Don DeLillo
#47. ...Take the leap, they said. Live the billionaire's myth of immortality. And why not now, I thought. What else was there for Ross to acquire? Give the futurists their blood money and they will make it possible for you to live forever.
The pod would be his final shrine of entitlement.
Don DeLillo
#48. Technology has become a force of nature. We can't control it. It comes blowing over the planet and there's nowhere for us to hide.
Don DeLillo
#49. There's never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President.
Don DeLillo
#50. I feel artificially myself. I'm someone who's supposed to be me.
Don DeLillo
#51. 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
#52. Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?'
What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing
Don DeLillo
#53. Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it.
Don DeLillo
#54. The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone's, into some other distance, out beyond the towers.
Don DeLillo
#55. In a country that's in a hurry to make the future, the names attached to the products are an enduring reassurance.
Don DeLillo
#56. Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.
Don DeLillo
#57. Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets.
Don DeLillo
#58. World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.
Don DeLillo
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.
Don DeLillo
#62. That's what in theory differentiates a writer from everyone else. You see and hear more clearly.
Don DeLillo
#63. 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
#64. I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography.
Don DeLillo
#65. That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.
Don DeLillo
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. I know it's thankless to be sensible in the face of someone's primitive distrust.
Don DeLillo
#69. Let's enjoy these aimless days while we can, I told myself, fearing some kind of deft acceleration.
Don DeLillo
#70. Find someone to push him ever sunward.
There's always something you're not supposed to see but it is a condition of growing up that you will see it.
Don DeLillo
#71. That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.
Don DeLillo
#72. Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another's care and protection.
Don DeLillo
#73. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure.
Don DeLillo
#74. Through history it's the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist?
Don DeLillo
#75. It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line. I assume you know that, he said.
Don DeLillo
#76. 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
#77. Sex finds us. sex sees through us. that's why it's so shattering. it strips us of appearances._Eric Packer
Don DeLillo
#78. 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
#79. I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let's not say men. Let's say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.
Don DeLillo
#80. And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?
Don DeLillo
#81. Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.
Don DeLillo
#82. 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
#83. There's always a host of voices you're inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He's one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens.
Dylan Moran
#84. Exile in a real place, a place of few bodies and many stones, is just an extension (a packaging) of the other exile, the state of being separated from whatever is left of the center of one's own history
Don DeLillo
#85. He liked to mingle with shopping mall crowds. "I'm counting on you to tell me, Jack." "Tell you what?" "You're the only person I know that's educated enough to give me the answer." "The answer to what?" "Were people this dumb before television?" One
Don DeLillo
#86. 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
#87. 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
#89. Mouth cat's-cradled with filaments of gleaming cheese.
Don DeLillo
#90. 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
#91. I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.
Don DeLillo
#92. There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.
Don DeLillo
#93. The nice thing about life is that it's filled with second chances. Quoting Bill.
Don DeLillo
#94. Any curly-haired boy can write windswept ballads. You have to crush people's heads. That's the only way to make those fuckers listen.
Don DeLillo
#95. DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.
Leslie Fiedler
#96. I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read. I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.
Don DeLillo
#97. There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of the things they aren't telling us.
Don DeLillo
#98. Famous people don't want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there's something crawling in their clothes.
Don DeLillo
#99. If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.
Don DeLillo
#100. That's great. Tell me about it. I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography. The beginning of the end.
Don DeLillo
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