Don DeLillo Quotes

206 Sourced Quotes

It's the size of things that worries people. No reason for the universe to be so large.

Don DeLillo
Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

Don DeLillo
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
A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.

Don DeLillo
I think silence is the condition you accept as the judgment on your crimes.

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

Don DeLillo
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
Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the sombre renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings.

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
There's something nearly mystical about certain words and phrases that float through our lives. It's computer mysticism. Words that are computer generated to be used on products that might be sold anywhere from Japan to Denmark - words devised to be pronounceable in a hundred languages. And when you detach one of these words from the product it was designed to serve, the words acquires a chantlike quality.

Don DeLillo
In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere.

Don DeLillo
There are times when you want to stop working at faith and just be washed in a blowing wind that tells you everything.

Don DeLillo
It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at.

Don DeLillo
Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.

Don DeLillo
What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

Don DeLillo
What did it mean, the first time, a thinking creature looked deeply into another's eyes? Did it take a hundred thousand years before this happened or it was the first thing they did, transcendingly, the thing that made them higher, made them modern, the gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls?

Don DeLillo
The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.

Don DeLillo
Clouds are no deterrent. Clouds intensify the drama, trap and shape the light.

Don DeLillo
Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past.

Don DeLillo
Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously, I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered.

Don DeLillo
Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire--not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.

Don DeLillo
I don't consider myself paranoid at all. I think I see things exactly as they are.

Don DeLillo
In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too.

Don DeLillo