110+ Don Delillo Quotes On Education, Religion And Writing

Don DeLillo is an American novelist, playwright, and essayist. His works are known for their sharp social commentary and criticism of consumerism and postmodern culture. His novels include White Noise, Underworld, and Falling Man, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1988. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Don Delillo on education, leadership, love.

Top 10 Don Delillo Quotes

1. 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.
2. I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.
3. We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.
4. I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.
5. California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
6. And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?
7. There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.
8. 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.
9. The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
10. Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.

Don Delillo Short Quotes

• The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.
• It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.
• She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn't working.
• Longing on a large scale makes history.
• To be a tourist is to escape accountability.
• Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination.
• Tourism is the march of stupidity.
• Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.
• The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.
• I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.

Don Delillo Quotes About Love

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

Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link. — Don Delillo

My attitudes aren't directed toward characters at all. I don't feel sympathetic toward some characters, unsympathetic toward others. I don't love some characters, feel contempt for others. They have attitudes; I don't. — 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

the instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms — Don Delillo

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. — Don Delillo

Don Delillo Quotes About Writing

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals. — 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

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. — Don Delillo

In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary from book to book. But in many books, there is a colloquialism of address. The characters will speak in a quite idiosyncratic way sometimes. — Don Delillo

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

You become a serious novelist by living long enough. — Don Delillo

I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore — Don Delillo

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. — 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

I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone. — Don Delillo

Don Delillo Quotes About White Noise

The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire. — Don Delillo

Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn. — Don Delillo

Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit. — Don Delillo

Isn't death the boundary we need? — Don Delillo

The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear. — Don Delillo

Don Delillo Quotes About World

The world isn't going to be destroyed, but you don't feel safe anymore in your plane or train or office or auditorium. — 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, he says, that are most natural to him. — Don Delillo

The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation. — Don Delillo

Don't you realize that as long as you have to sit down to pee, you'll never be a dominant force in the world? You'll never be a convincing technocrat or middle manager. Because people will know. She's in there sitting down. — Don Delillo

Hardship makes the world obscure. — Don Delillo

I never wanted to change the world. Norman Mailer wanted to, he set himself the task of changing the consciousness of our age. And I think he came pretty close, in the 1960s, to actually managing to do it. But me? No, no, I never wanted anything like that. I'm not Maileresque. — 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

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

The difference between the world of pictures and the world of printed matter is extraordinary and hard to define. A picture is like the masses: a multitude of impressions. A book on the other hand, with its linear advance of words and characters seems to be connected to individual identity. — Don Delillo

The world is shrinking into a kind of technological funnel. I think people are drawn into their technological devices, and this becomes a kind of subjective universe, into which much of the rest of the world simply does not enter. — Don Delillo

Don Delillo Quotes About People

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

People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it. — 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

Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death. — 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

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

He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it. — Don Delillo

Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals. — Don Delillo

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life. — Don Delillo

It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space. — Don Delillo

Don Delillo Quotes About Sense

If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself. — Don Delillo

There are two categories of writers, it could be said: The author who is just a voice, and the one who is also creating a picture. I belong to the latter, because I have an acute visual sense. — Don Delillo

Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope. — Don Delillo

There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion. — 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 it. — 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

Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses. — Don Delillo

When I work I have a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words I'm making. I use a machine with larger than average letters: the bigger the better. — Don Delillo

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

Don Delillo Quotes About Writer

To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices. — 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 he matches with the language. — Don Delillo

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

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. — Don Delillo

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. — Don Delillo

The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here. — 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

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

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

Don Delillo Quotes About Inside

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

There is a world inside the world. — Don Delillo

Something lurked inside the truth. — Don Delillo

Don Delillo Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Don Delillo

It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone. — Don Delillo

The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress. — 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

There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...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

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the sombre renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. — Don Delillo

In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled. — Don Delillo

Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain. — Don Delillo

Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational. — Don Delillo

Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping. — Don Delillo

Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. — Don Delillo

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

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. — Don Delillo

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

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? — 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

I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfilment in America. — Don Delillo

To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. — Don Delillo

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

Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of inter-communication is awe-inspiring. — 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

There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or 'terror in a lonely place', the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind. — Don Delillo

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. — Don Delillo

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? — 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

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

Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun. — Don Delillo

I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American. — 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

I'm not reclusive at all. Just private. — Don Delillo

The music I like best is kind of frozen in my mind from the Sixties and Seventies. I still listen to the same jazz music I listened to when I was eighteen years old, and like and admire it just as much. — Don Delillo

Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission. — Don Delillo

To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish. — Don Delillo

A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot. — Don Delillo

You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness. — Don Delillo

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

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level. — 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

Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera? Because our lives are a vivid situation. — Don Delillo

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

Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself. — 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 genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways. — Don Delillo

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear. — Don Delillo

If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act. — Don Delillo

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. — Don Delillo

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

For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work. — Don Delillo

Famous people don't want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there's something crawling in their clothes. — 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

There are no amateurs in the world of children. — Don Delillo

It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams — 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. — Don Delillo

The excitement of theatre is palpable but the frustrations, and the complete absence of a definitive evening - the play as text means practically nothing in a way - , there's no particular performance that is definitive in the way a novel is a solid object you hold in your hands and here it is. You can't say that about a play. If the novel gives us a sense of throbbing consciousness, theater is pure soul, beautiful and elusive. — Don Delillo

History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood -- read the speeches of Mussolini -- at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation. (82) — Don Delillo

They passed out of the shade beneath the eaves and flew into sunglare and silence and it was an action she only partly saw, elusive and mutely beautiful, the birds so sunstruck they were consumed by light, disembodied, turned into something sheer and fleet and scatter-bright. — Don Delillo

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

Life Lessons by Don Delillo

1. Don DeLillo emphasizes the importance of living in the present moment and understanding the power of individual choices. He encourages readers to think deeply about their lives and the world around them, and to take responsibility for their actions.
2. Don DeLillo also emphasizes the need to find meaning in life and to strive for personal growth. He encourages readers to look beyond the material world and to focus on the spiritual aspects of life.
3. Don DeLillo encourages readers to be mindful of their relationships with others and to strive for meaningful connections with the people in their lives. He encourages readers to be open to new experiences and to embrace change.