Don DeLillo Quotes

206 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

Don DeLillo
You feel sorry for yourself. You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is. You're lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash.

Don DeLillo
Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is 'I know this feeling. I was here before'.

Don DeLillo
Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first.

Don DeLillo
There was an honesty inherent in bulkiness if it is just the right amount.

Don DeLillo
We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

Don DeLillo
First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there's a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger.

Don DeLillo
There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.

Don DeLillo