Don DeLillo

You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.

— Don DeLillo

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.

— Don DeLillo

days like this. i look at you and feel electric. tell me you don't feel it too."_Eric Packer

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— 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…

— Don DeLillo

“Because we’re suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information.”

— Don DeLillo

“It is just so interesting," he says at last. "The colors and all." The colors and all.”

— Don DeLillo

“I'm not saying we shouldn't grieve. Just, why don't we put it in God's hands? she said. Why haven't we learned this,…

— Don DeLillo

“Some people are lucky. They become who they are supposed to be. This did not happen to me until I met (your…

— Don DeLillo

“The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run…

— 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…

— Don DeLillo

“But it can't be true that he drifts from one reality to another, independent of the logic of time. This is not…

— Don DeLillo

“Fee-uck, man. This game is still on. I get that sixty-two yet. I get his ass and whip it into shape. Damnright.…

— Don DeLillo

“What good is my truth? My truth means nothing. What if this guy with the gun comes from a planet in a…

— Don DeLillo

He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things,…

— Don DeLillo

“The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe." "As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more…

— Don DeLillo

“This was the first of the St. Augustines. Previous memos had borne messages from Zwingli, Lévi-Strauss, Rilke, Chekhov, Tillich, William Blake, Charles…

— Don DeLillo

“Picture yourself, Jack, a confirmed homebody, a sedentary fellow who finds himself walking in a deep wood. You spot something out of…

— Don DeLillo

“As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way…

— Don DeLillo

“I have a deep thought for you. Science fiction is just beginning to catch up with the Old Testament. See artificial nitrates…

— Don DeLillo

How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around,…

— Don DeLillo

“Cotter thinks he sees a path to the turnstile on the right. He drains himself of everything he does not need to…

— Don DeLillo

“Property is no longer about power, personality and command. It's not about vulgar display or tasteful display. Because it no longer has…

— Don DeLillo

Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.

— 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

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

— 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…

— Don DeLillo

It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.'

— 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…

— Don DeLillo

“There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which…

— Don DeLillo

“In the world today everything is shared. What kind of misery is it that can't be shared?”

— Don DeLillo

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as…

— Don DeLillo

“We all know how the thing we secretly fear is not a secret at all but the open and eternal thing that…

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

“Their bumper sticker read GUN CONTROL IS MIND CONTROL. In situations like this, you want to stick close to people in right-wing…

— Don DeLillo

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a…

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo