Don DeLillo Quotes & Sayings

When Lee has a certain look on his face, eyes kind of amused, mouth small and tight, he finds himself thinking of his father. He believes it is a look his father may have used. It feels like his father. A curious sensation, the look coming upon him, taking hold in an unmistakable way, and then his old man is here, eerie and forceful and whole, a meeting across worlds. — Don DeLillo

Marian and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn't say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make? — Don DeLillo

The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things. — Don DeLillo

I know it's thankless to be sensible in the face of someone's primitive distrust. — Don DeLillo

Only absences were fully shared. — Don DeLillo

In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. — Don DeLillo

At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her. — Don DeLillo

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know. — Don DeLillo

And this is what I mainly learned up there, that the Parthenon was not a thing to study but to feel. It wasn't aloof, rational, timeless, pure. I couldn't locate the serenity of the place, the logic and steady sense. It wasn't a relic species of dead Greece but part of the living city below it. This was a surprise. I'd thought it was a separate thing, the sacred height, intact in its Doric order. I hadn't expected a human feeling to emerge from the stones but this is what I found, deeper than the art and mathematics embodied in the structure, the optical exactitudes. I found a cry for pity. — Don DeLillo

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is - an intense form of thought. — Don DeLillo

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

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

Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself. — Don DeLillo

I am a twentiethcentury individual. I am working myself up to a point where I can exist beyond guilt, beyond blood, beyond the ridiculous past. Thank goodness for America. In this country there's a chance to accomplish such a thing. I want to look straight ahead. I want to see things clearly. I'd like to become singleminded and straightforward in the most literal sense of those words. History is no more accurate than prophecy. I reject the wrathful God of the Hebrews. I reject the Christian God of love and money, although I don't reject love itself or money itself. I reject heritage, background, tradition and birthright. These things merely slow the progress of the human race. They result in war and insanity, war and insanity, war and insanity. — Don DeLillo

The pattern match begins with a search for a substring of a given string that has a specified structure in the string manipulation language — Don DeLillo

The whole country's going to puke blood when they read it. — Don DeLillo

They know him at molecular level. He lives in them like chains of matter that determine who they are. — Don DeLillo

Every act he performed was self-haunted and synthetic. — Don DeLillo

It's not the sex you think i've had. it's the sex i want. that's what you smell on me. because the more i look at you, the more i know about us both.and the more i want to have sex with you. because there's a certain kind of sex that has an element of cleansing. it's the antidote to disillusion. the counterpoison._Eric Packer — Don DeLillo

I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change. — Don DeLillo

I thought of women in other places, streets and boulevards in major cities, wind blowing, a woman's skirt lifting in the breeze, the way the wind tenses the skirt, giving shape to the legs, making the skirt dip between the legs, revealing knees and thighs. Were these my father's thoughts or mine? — Don DeLillo

No, no, no, no. Who are you? What is this? Don't leave. They're leaving. They've left. — Don DeLillo

Heat that rots ambition and stuns the intellect and will. — Don DeLillo

We need time to lose interest in things. — Don DeLillo

Is this a mild winter or a harsh winter? — Don DeLillo

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take. — 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

Another one says she has asnap-off crotch. What do you think she means by that? I'm a little worried,though, about all these outbreaks of lifestyle diseases. I carry a reinforced ribbed condom at all times. One size fits all. But I have a feeling it's not much protection against the intelligence and adaptability of the modern virus. — Don DeLillo

Everything I've stated may prove to be total poppycock ... Perhaps time will tell. Perhaps time will do nothing of the kind. — Don DeLillo

Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. — Don DeLillo

That's how you write novels actually. You suddenly hit upon something and you realize this is the path you were meant to take. You'd be a fool if you didn't follow it. Perhaps it's like solving a difficult question in pure mathematics. There must be a moment when the solution is so simple and evident that you wonder why you hadn't come upon it before. When you do come upon it, you know it in the deepest part of your being. It carries its own logic. — Don DeLillo

I would think of it with affection because of its scenes of fragmentary beauty, because it brought men closer together through their perversity and fear, because it enabled us to pretend that death could be a tender experience, and because it breached the long silence. — Don DeLillo

The plane had lost power in all three engines, dropped from thirty-four thousand feet to twelve thousand feet. Something like four miles. When the steep glide began, people rose, fell, collided, swam in their seats. Then the serious screaming and moaning began. Almost immediately a voice from the flight deck was heard on the intercom: "We're falling out of the sky! We're going down! We're a silver gleaming death machine!" This outburst struck the passengers as an all but total breakdown of authority, competence and command presence and it brought on a round of fresh and desperate wailing. — Don DeLillo

I'm not just a college professor. I'm the head of a department. I don't see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That's for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are. — Don DeLillo

There's a rumor it seems involving the finance minister. He's supposed to resign any time now," she said. "Some kind of scandal about a misconstrued comment. He made a comment about the economy that may have been misconstrued. The whole country is analyzing the grammar and syntax of this comment. Or it wasn't even what he said. It was when he paused. They are trying to construe the meaning of the pause. It could be deeper, even, than grammar. It could be breathing. — Don DeLillo

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

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

Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it. — Don DeLillo

I felt myself getting whiter ... What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in? — Don DeLillo

Then they're always trying to sell you something. Everything is based on forcing people to buy. If you can't buy what they're selling, you're a zero in the system. — Don DeLillo

Writing is an organized way of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write them. — Don DeLillo

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

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful. — Don DeLillo

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

The art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. — Don DeLillo

It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story. — Don DeLillo

If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity. — Don DeLillo

Brita said, 'I read at home, I read in hotels, I take a book with me on a twenty-minute trip to the dentist. Then I read in the waiting room. — Don DeLillo

Through history it's the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist? — Don DeLillo

What about the Americans?" "Eerie people. Genetically engineered to play squash and work weekends. — Don DeLillo

Television. Maybe it was all a study in the art of mummification. The effect of the medium is so evanescent that those who work in its time apparatus feel the need to preserve themselves, delivering their bodies to be lacquered and trussed, sprayed with the rarest of pressurized jellies, all to one end, a release from the perilous context of time. This is their only vanity, to expect to dwell forever in hermetic sub-corridors, free of every ravage, secure as old kings asleep in sodium. — Don DeLillo

She is the kind of child who feels a protective tenderness toward her own beginnings. It is part of her strategy in a world of displacements to make every effort to restore and preserve, keep things together for their value as remembering objects, a way of fastening herself to a life. — Don DeLillo

She knows what he means, that they don't have to touch. the same thing that's happening to him is happening to her. she doesn't need to crawl under the table ans suck his dick. too tire to interest either one of them. the flow is strong between them. the emotional tone. let it express itself. he sees her in her wallow and feel his pelvic muscles begin to quiver. he say, tell me to stop and i'll stop. but he doesn't wait for her to reply. there isn't time. the tails of his sperm cells are lashing already. she is his sweetheart and lover and slut undying. he doesn't have to do the unspeakable thing he wants to do. he only has to speak it. because they're beyond every model of established behavior. he only wants to say the words. _Eric Packer — Don DeLillo

We have learned not to be afraid of the dark but we've forgotten that darkness means death. — Don DeLillo

The self. What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others? — Don DeLillo

Numbers behave, words do not. — Don DeLillo

People weren't saying Oh wow anymore. They were saying No way instead and she wondered if there was something she might learn from this. — Don DeLillo

Of course you know. You're brilliant. Everyone says so."
"What else can they say? I do neurochemistry. No one knows what that is. — Don DeLillo

She means everything literally. Don't kid yourself about that lady. She means everything literally. — Don DeLillo

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending. — Don DeLillo

You are sure that you are right but you don't want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. — Don DeLillo

We have to change truth a little in order to remember it. — Don DeLillo

Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others. — Don DeLillo

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

I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds. — Don DeLillo

Along some northern coast at sundown a beaten gold light is waterborne, sweeping across lakes and tracing zigzag rivers to the sea, and we know we're in transit again, half numb to the secluded beauty down there, the slate land we're leaving behind, the peneplain, to cross these rainbands in deep night. This is time totally lost to us. We don't remember it. We take no sense impressions with us, no voices, none of the windy blast of the aircraft on the tarmac, or the white noise of flight, or the hours waiting. Nothing sticks to us but smoke in our hair and clothes. It is dead time. It never happened until it happens again. Then it never happened. — Don DeLillo

It referred to intense mental suffering, deep remorse, extreme anguish, acute sorrow and the like. — Don DeLillo

It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube. 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

I would spend the rest of my life turning to speak to her. — Don DeLillo

The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements. — Don DeLillo

Ordinary moments make the life. This is what she knew to be trustworthy and this is what I learned, eventually, from those years we spent together. No leaps or falls. I inhale the little drizzly details of the past and know who I am. What I failed to know before is clearer now, filtered up through time, an experience belonging to no one else, not remotely, no one, anyone, ever. I watch her use the roller to remove lint from her cloth coat. Define coat, I tell myself. Define time, define space. — Don DeLillo

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books. — Don DeLillo

I felt the distance and stillness of that sprawled dawn like some endless sky waking inside me, flared against the laughter. — Don DeLillo

Then she took of her panties and handed them to me. I tossed them on the bed and got undressed.
I felt a breath of estrangement in the room and thought she might be a voyeur of her own experience, living at an angle to the moment and recording in some state of future-mind. But then she pulled me down, snatched a fistful of hair and pulled me into a kiss, and there was a heat in her, a hungry pulse that resembled a gust of being. — Don DeLillo

There may be as many people taking pictures as there are brides and grooms. One of them for every one of us. Clickety-click. The thought makes the couples a little giddy. They feel that space is contagious. They are here but also there, already in albums and slide projectors, filling picture frames with their microcosmic bodies, the minikin selves they are trying to become. — Don DeLillo

In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. There's too much everything, more things and messages and meanings that we can use in ten thousand lifetimes. Inertia-hysteria. Is history possible? Is anyone serious? Who do we take serious? Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith. Everything else is absorbed. The artist is absorbed, the madman in the street is absorbed an processed and incorporated. Give him a dollar, put him in a TV commercial. Only the terrorists stand outside. The culture hasn't figured out how to assimilate him. It's confusing when they kill the innocent. But this is precisely the language of being noticed, the only language the West understands. The way they determine how we see them. The way they dominate the rush of endless streaming images. — Don DeLillo

She liked to think. What did she like to think? She was having a dumb day and wanted to blame the fog.
Maybe he falls, he slides, if that is a useful word, from his experience of an objective world, the deepest description of space-time, where he does not feel a sense of future direction - he slides into her experience, everyone's, the standard sun-kissed chronology of events.
Am I the first human to abduct an alien? — Don DeLillo

I'd like to lose interest in myself ... — Don DeLillo

It takes centuries to invent the primitive. — Don DeLillo

Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world. — Don DeLillo

Ample women do not plan such things. They lack the guile for conspiracies of the body. — Don DeLillo

To men at this remove, it is as though things exist in their particular physical form in order to reveal the hidden simplicity of some powerful mathematical truth. — Don DeLillo

I want to put your voice back inside your body, where it belongs. — Don DeLillo

The dead have a presence. — Don DeLillo

Don't you sometimes feel a power in you? An extreme state of good health. An arrogant healthiness. That's it. You are feeling so good you begin thinking you're a little superior to most people. An optimism about yourself that you generate at the expense of others. Don't you sometimes feel this? — Don DeLillo

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

It is interesting ... how weapons reflect the soul of the maker. — Don DeLillo

Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving. — Don DeLillo

How memory conspires with objects of human craft, pressing time flat, inciting a tender reminiscence. — Don DeLillo

I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never. — Don DeLillo

Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck. Things have no limits now. Money has no limits. I don't understand money anymore. Money is undone. Violence is undone, violence is easier now, it's uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values. — 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

It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city. All the guiding principles that might flow from a center of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, one or another kind of pornography. This is how it is with towns. — Don DeLillo

Talent is more erotic when it's wasted. — Don DeLillo

Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious? — Don DeLillo

When she started back she saw a blue jay perched atop the feeder. She stopped dead and held her breath. It stood large and polished and looked royally remote from the other birds busy feeding and she could nearly believe she'd never seen a jay before. It stood enormous, looking in at her, seeing whatever it saw, and she wanted to tell Rey to look up. She watched it, black-barred across the wings and tail, and she thought she'd somehow only now learned how to look. She'd never seen a thing so clearly and it was not simply because the jay was posted where it was, close enough for her to note the details of cresting and color. There was also the clean shock of its appearance among the smaller brownish birds, its mineral blue and muted blue and broad dark neckband. But if Rey looked up, the bird would fly. — Don DeLillo

Is there a fungus that speaks to you? I'm serious. People hear things. They hear God.
He meant it. He was serious. He wanted to mean it, to hear anything the man might say, the whole
shapeless narrative of his unraveling. — Don DeLillo

Marvin thought of his bowel movements as BMs, a phrase he'd heard an army doctor mutter once. His BMs were turning against him, turning violent in a way. He and Eleanor went through the Dolomites and across Austria and nipped into the northwest corner of Hungary and the stuff came crashing out of him, noisy and remarkably dark. But mainly it was the smell that disturbed him. He was afraid Eleanor would notice. He realized this was probably a normal part of every early marriage, smelling the other's smell, getting it over and done with so you can move ahead with your lives, have children, buy a little house, remember everybody's birthday, take a drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway, get sick and die. But in this case the husband had to take extreme precautions because the odor was shameful, it was intense and deeply personal and seemed to say something awful about the bearer.
His smell was a secret he had to keep from his wife. — Don DeLillo

Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated. — Don DeLillo

I think we ought to have our intercourse now. — Don DeLillo