Top 350 Quotes & Sayings by Don DeLillo

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.

I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.

I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.

I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.

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.

I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it.

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

Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.

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

There's never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President.

I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

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

May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.

The future belongs to crowds.

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?

The language of my books has shaped me as a man.

Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn't live his life in a certain way, this death is an introduction to an eternity of pain.

America was and is the immigrant's dream.

Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.

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

In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.

I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.

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

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

People will always make comparisons.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

Hardship makes the world obscure.

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.

I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.

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.

There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.

One 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.

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.

Rushdie is a hostage.

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.

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

The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

Pain is just another form of information.

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

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.

I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

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

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