Don DeLillo Quotes

Once out of the mailroom, I began to learn more about fear. As soonas fear begins to ascend, anatomi...

I like simple men and complicated women.

Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.

Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's the...

Within sixty-minute limits or one-hundred-yard limits or the limits of a game board, we can look for...

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular ex...

It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of indepen...

As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.

The plane had lost power in all three engines, dropped from thirty-four thousand feet to twelve thou...

The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.

Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?'What good is a preciousness based on fear an...

Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a l...

Everything was on television last night

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lov...

I am the false character that follows the name around.

Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to b...

If you could stretch a given minute, what would you find between its unstuck components? Probably so...

Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there a...

Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to ove...

Steffie took my hand and we walked past the fruit bins, an area that extended about forty-five yards...

I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.

Why are free spirits always so fucking dumb?

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

Secrets are an exalted state, almost a dream state. They're a way of arresting motion, stopping the ...

Then they’re always trying to sell you something. Everything is based on forcing people to buy. If y...

It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and ...

God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the .45 to even things up.

Do you know why I believe in the novel? It’s a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, on...

The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place wher...

He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows.

I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-maker...

When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear...

Only absences were fully shared.

Money was spiritual indemnity against some unspecifiable future loss. It existed in purest form in h...

Fear is intense self-awareness.

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to k...

Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he ...

As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting press...

All that incoherence. Selection, election, option, alternative. All behind him now. Codes and format...

You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out" - Murray (WN 285).

This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It th...

Ordinary moments make the life. This is what she knew to be trustworthy and this is what I learned, ...

The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.

I'd never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a...

That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.

When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.

Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you a...

In the countryside he heard horns and drums and followed the sound to a temple of granite and marble...

How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a cen...

Vanity is a defensive quality. it contains an element of fear.

Memory is the faculty of absolution. Men developed memories to ease their disquiet over things they ...

Air travel reminds us who we are. It’s the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The proc...

A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the e...

That's why he was here, to surrender himself to longing, to listen to his host recite the anecdotal ...

You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.

A naked woman was amazing.He'd never seen it this way, in full light, without half-off clothes or a ...

My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simp...

This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the count...

I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tong...

How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take...

Man’s guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the dai...

The vast and terrible depth."“Of course,” he said.“The inexhaustibility.”“I understand.”“The whole h...

We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White f...

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

There were no laptops or handheld devices in class. Ilgauskas didn't exclude them; we did, sort of, ...

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For...

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when th...

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there ...

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone wa...

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in th...

Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age ...

This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track.

Everybody wants to own the end of the world.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three o...

Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me. I spent my life in small steamy...

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.

When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to ...

People get bitten. But I won't.' I found myself saying, 'You will, you will. These snakes don't know...

I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an Am...

What was the barn like before it was photographed?' he said. 'What did it look like, how was it diff...

Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We don't need God or m...

She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her...

You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels.""Its own grave-diggers," he said."B...

I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these p...

I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to un...

The future belongs to crowds.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himsel...

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication...

We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine ...

Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.

How language is webbed in the senses. Out of sand-blazed brilliance into quirky minds such as his, i...

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made...

How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we lov...

When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have a...

People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furth...

The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague craving...

How many times do two people have to fuck before one of them deserves to die?" _Eric Packer