Don DeLillo Quotes

206 Sourced Quotes

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

Don DeLillo
There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.

Don DeLillo
The thing that's interesting about living in another country is that it's difficult to forget you're an American. The actions of the American Government won't let you. They make you self-conscious.

Don DeLillo
A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.

Don DeLillo
It's not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.

Don DeLillo
The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you've killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it's ordinary murder.

Don DeLillo
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
In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are.

Don DeLillo
Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.

Don DeLillo
A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot...

Don DeLillo
We commit our crimes at night and reveal ourselves in the high noon of studio lights.

Don DeLillo
Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of inter-communication is awe-inspiring.

Don DeLillo
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
It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

Don DeLillo
You gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.

Don DeLillo
Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into the night, if you stand a while and look.

Don DeLillo
Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.

Don DeLillo
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
The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.

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

Don DeLillo
Every disaster made us wish for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.

Don DeLillo
Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.

Don DeLillo
When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.

Don DeLillo
I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing.

Don DeLillo
Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.

Don DeLillo
Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.

Don DeLillo
Terror makes the new future possible. All men one man, Men live in history as never before. He is saying we make an change history minute by minute. History is not the book or the human memory. We do history in the morning and change it after lunch.

Don DeLillo
The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.

Don DeLillo
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
In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled.

Don DeLillo