Delillo Quotes & Sayings

People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units. — Don DeLillo

There's a certain man, an archetype, he's a model of dependability for his male friends, all the things a friend should be, an ally and confidant, lends money, gives advice, loyal and so on, but sheer hell on women. Living breathing hell. The closer a woman gets, the clearer it becomes to him that she is not one of his male friends. And the more awful it becomes for her. This is Keith. This is the man you're going to marry. — Don DeLillo

Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination. — Don DeLillo

The white marble surface was inlaid with semiprecious stones in seamless floral designs and in chaste calligraphy, shaped stones, jeweled stones, delicate and free-figured. The surface ran cool and smooth. Traceries of black Koranic figures covered the longer sides of the tomb with a smaller group on top. My hand moved slowly over the words, feeling for breaks between the inlay and marble, not to fault the craftsmen, of course, but only to find the human labor, the individual, in the wholeness and beauty of the tomb. — Don DeLillo

Technology has become a force of nature. We can't control it. It comes blowing over the planet and there's nowhere for us to hide. — Don DeLillo

Ask yourself what it is you want more, to ease your ancient fear or to revenge your childish dopey injured male pride." I — 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

He liked to mingle with shopping mall crowds. "I'm counting on you to tell me, Jack." "Tell you what?" "You're the only person I know that's educated enough to give me the answer." "The answer to what?" "Were people this dumb before television?" One — Don DeLillo

Everyone wants to own the end of the world. — Don DeLillo

I'm at that certain stage in a night of drinking and talking when I see things clearly through a small opening, a window in space. — Don DeLillo

The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe." "As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe ... Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. — Don DeLillo

It is only me, the body in the shower, one person enclosed in plastic watching a drop of water skate down the wet curtain. The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It is a moment never to be thought of except when it is in the process of unfolding. — Don DeLillo

The instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms. — Don DeLillo

There is no lie in war or preparation of war that can't be defended. — Don DeLillo

There were no laptops or handheld devices in class. Ilgauskas didn't exclude them; we did, sort of, unspokenly. Some of us could barely complete a thought without touch pads or scroll buttons, but we understood that high-speed data systems did not belong here. They were an assault on the environment, which was defined by length, width, and depth, with time drawn out, computed in heartbeats. — Don DeLillo

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

Decorative gestures add romance to a life. — Don DeLillo

Choice is a subtle form of disease. — Don DeLillo

If you could stretch a given minute, what would you find between its unstuck components? Probably some kind of astral madness. A bleak comprehension of the final size of things. — Don DeLillo

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

That's what in theory differentiates a writer from everyone else. You see and hear more clearly. — 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 lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely. — Don DeLillo

Maybe this man experiences another kind of reality where he is here and there, before and after, and he moves from one to the other shatteringly, in a state of collapse, minus an identity, a language, a way to enjoy the savor of the honey-coated toast she watches him eat. She — 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

The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it. — 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

DeLillo presents art as the soundest magic against dread, the truest source of radiance and community. Albeit tentatively and ambiguously, Underworld suggests that artists may achieve an accommodation with culture that is also act of resistance. (7) — Mark Osteen

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

Even at a distance, her mouth showed the small pursed conceit of a remark in the making. — Don DeLillo

A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require. — Don DeLillo

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

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely. — 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

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

How can people live their whole lives without knowing the names of their own parts of the body? — Don DeLillo

What were we like then in that time and space, unburdened of the weight of outer sound? We were angels harboring each other in the notion of desirelessness, dazed in our acquiescence to the drift through subatomic matter. The love of minds should last beyond lives. Maybe it does, each mind a dice-toss of neutron stars, invisible except to theory, pulling at cold space to find its lover. — 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

watched the coffee bubble up through the center tube and perforated basket into the small pale globe. A marvelous and sad invention, so roundabout, ingenious, human. It was like a philosophical argument rendered in terms of the things of the world - water, metal, brown beans. I had never looked at coffee before. — Don DeLillo

Secrets are an exalted state, almost a dream state. They're a way of arresting motion, stopping the world so we can see ourselves in it. — Don DeLillo

It was necessary because she needed to do it. This is what made it necessary. — 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. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live. — 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

There is another kind of belief, a second force, insecure, untrusting, a faith that is spring-fed by the things we fear in the night. — Don DeLillo

Branch is stuck all right. He has abandoned his life to understanding that moment in Dallas, the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century. [ ... ] There is also the Warren Report, of course, with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words. Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred. — 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. [ ... ] To plot, to take aim at something, to shape time and space. This is how we advance the art of human consciousness. (WN 291-2) — 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

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

As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive. — Don DeLillo

And you keep on looking. You look because this is the nature of the footage, to make a channeled path through time, to give things a shape and a destiny. — Don DeLillo

You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal existence on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. — Don DeLillo

Self-pity oozed through my soul. I tried to relax and enjoy it. — Don DeLillo

The painted aircraft took on sunlight and pulse. Sweeps of color, bands and spatters, airy washes, the force of saturated light - the whole thing oddly personal, a sense of one painter's hand moved by impulse and afterthought as much as by epic design. I hadn't expected to register such pleasure and sensation. The air was color-scrubbed, coppers and ochers burning off the metal skin of the aircraft to exchange with the framing desert. — 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

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

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die. — Don DeLillo

What people discard could make a nation — Don DeLillo

Sex finds us. sex sees through us. that's why it's so shattering. it strips us of appearances._Eric Packer — Don DeLillo

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

A closeness that felt sorry and cheap the minute she walked out of the room. — Don DeLillo

Silence, exile, cunning and so on ... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work. — Don DeLillo

I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own distasters. — Don DeLillo

He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world. — Don DeLillo

I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become. — Don DeLillo

I was not a happy runner. I did it to stay interested in my body, to stay informed, and to set up clear lines of endeavor, a standard to meet, a limit to stay within. I was just enough of a puritan to think there must be some virtue in rigorous things, although I was careful not to overdo it. I never wore the clothes. the shorts, tank top, high socks. Just running shoes and a lightweight shirt and jeans. I ran disguised as an ordinary person. — Don DeLillo

Do we have to believe something happened exactly the way it was shown by artists? — Don DeLillo

But that's why you built the towers, isn't it? Weren't the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is clear. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It's a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down. — Don DeLillo

You and I. We're here. So might as well. — Don DeLillo

It was these secondary levels of life, these extrasensory flashes and floating nuances of being, these pockets of rapport forming unexpectedly, that made me believe we were a magic act, adults and children together, sharing unaccountable things — Don DeLillo

American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous. — Don DeLillo

People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It's simply how we live. — Don DeLillo

Digital clocks took the 'space' out of time. — Don DeLillo

Once you start a file, Delphine, it's just a matter of time before the material comes pouring in. Notes, lists, photos, rumors. Every bit and piece and whisper in the world that doesn't have a life until someone comes along to collect it. It's all been waiting just for you. — Don DeLillo

A fact is innocent until someone wants it; then it become intelligence. — Don DeLillo

It takes centuries to invent the primitive. — Don DeLillo

It just means you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that. — Don DeLillo

BUDGE (muffled)
No,no,nono.
NURSE BAKER
I understand what you're trying to say.
BUDGE
A hideous scream.
NURSE BAKER
Exactly.
BUDGE
A cry of desperation.
NURSE BAKER
Perfect.
BUDGE
A strangled sob. A plea torn from my throat. What sound can I make to convince you I'm not the one you want? A disconsolate sigh? Maybe that's what you want to hear. The smallest human moan imaginable. A whisper in a corner of an unlit room, with curtains blowing in the wind.
NURSE BAKER
What could be more touching? — Don DeLillo

Terror is now the world narrative, unquestionably. When those two buildings were struck, and when they collapsed, it was, in effect, an extraordinary blow to consciousness, and it changed everything. — 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

I've bought these peanuts before. They're round, cubical, pock-marked, seamed. Broken peanuts. A lot of dust at the bottom of the jar. But they taste good. Most of all I like the packages themselves. You were right, Jack. This is the last avant-garde. Bold new forms. The power to shock. — Don DeLillo

People eat and sleep in the shadow of what we do — Don DeLillo

If you don't have the grace and wit to die early, you are forced to vanish, to hide as if in shame and apology. — Don DeLillo

It occurred to me that perhaps in this city the crowd was essential to the individual; without it, he had nothing against which to scrape his anger, no echo for grief, and not the slightest proof that there were others more lonely than he. it was just a passing thought. — Don DeLillo

Evil is movement towards void. — Don DeLillo

Naturally a direct comparison of terrorist and novelist is complete nonsense. But there was once a time when the novelist also had some influence on how his contemporaries thought, the way they saw the world, the way they lived. — Don DeLillo

There's the life and there's the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie? Everything seeks its own heightened version. — Don DeLillo

The shallower our arguments, the more intense we became. — Don DeLillo

He drove into the spewing smoke of acres of burning truck tires and the planes descended and the transit cranes stood in rows at the marine terminal and he saw billboards for Hertz and Avis and Chevy Blazer, for Marlboro, Continental and Goodyear, and he realized that all the things around him, the planes taking off and landing, the streaking cars, the tires on the cars, the cigarettes that the drivers of the cars were dousing in their ashtrays
all these were on the billboards around him, systematically linked in some self-referring relationship that had a kind of neurotic tightness, an inescapability, as if the billboards were generating reality ... — Don DeLillo

Pleasure is not diversion but urgent life, a social order perceived as temporary. — Don DeLillo

I had to wonder whether this interval had any more spread and breadth than just another sequestered moment, bordered by closed doors. We — Don DeLillo

America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy. — Don DeLillo

Find someone to push him ever sunward.
There's always something you're not supposed to see but it is a condition of growing up that you will see it. — Don DeLillo

I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world. — Don DeLillo

I think it's only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place. But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes. — Don DeLillo

My favorite sports novel is End Zone by Delillo. It's such a great looking book too, the black cover with the football player on it. It's just a fantastic little book. — Chad Harbach

Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn. — Don DeLillo

Tuition at the College-on-the-Hill is fourteen thousand dollars, Sunday brunch included. — Don DeLillo

Let's enjoy these aimless days while we can, I told myself, fearing some kind of deft acceleration. — Don DeLillo

Is a cardigan what women wear when they don't want to talk about themselves? — Don DeLillo

No body knows how to feel and they're checking around for hints. — Don DeLillo