Don DeLillo Quotes

206 Sourced Quotes

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
We surrounded ourselves with smoke and loud noise. That's the way we chose to live. I'm prepared to defend it.

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

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

Don DeLillo
Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.

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

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

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

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

Don DeLillo
The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.

Don DeLillo
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
If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.

Don DeLillo
We're the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter.

Don DeLillo
Time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find... The future becomes insistent.

Don DeLillo
The best moments involve a loss of control. It's a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often - completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages - I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.

Don DeLillo
I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfilment in America...

Don DeLillo
I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.

Don DeLillo
The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.

Don DeLillo
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
To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity.

Don DeLillo
People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.

Don DeLillo