Don DeLillo quotes

Don DeLillo is an American novelist and playwright, renowned for his postmodern works exploring contemporary culture and politics. His influential novels, such as "White Noise" and "Underworld," have shaped modern American literature. He continues to be celebrated for his incisive commentary and original style. Here are 166 of his quotes:

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

The future belongs to crowds.

Don DeLillo

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

Don DeLillo

That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.

Don DeLillo

He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.

Don DeLillo

I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.

Don DeLillo

It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.

Don DeLillo

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.

Don DeLillo

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

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

Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.

Don DeLillo

War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.

Don DeLillo

The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

Don DeLillo

When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.

Don DeLillo

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

Don DeLillo

Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S. Why not use it?

Don DeLillo

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.

Don DeLillo

The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now.

Don DeLillo

You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

Don DeLillo

I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing.

Don DeLillo

Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets.

Don DeLillo

There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?

Don DeLillo