Don DeLillo Quotes

God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the .45 to even things up.

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

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

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track.

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.

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

Fear is intense self-awareness.

The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.

Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?

I am the false character that follows the name around.

Money was spiritual indemnity against some unspecifiable future loss. It existed in purest form in his mind, my money, a reinforcing source of meditation.

Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.

Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.

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 selling, you’re a zero in the system.

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

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

The future belongs to crowds.

He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.

Everybody wants to own the end of the world.

Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.

She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear.Eric Packer about Vija Kinski

I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.

Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?'What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing

Everything was on television last night

I like simple men and complicated women.

Memory is the faculty of absolution. Men developed memories to ease their disquiet over things they did as men. The deep past is the only innocence and therefore necessary to retain.

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

All that incoherence. Selection, election, option, alternative. All behind him now. Codes and formats. Courses of action. Values, bias, predilection. Choice is a subtle form of disease.

Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.

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

The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings.

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.

We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identicalstructures.

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

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.

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

You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out" - Murray (WN 285).

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

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

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.

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

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.

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

When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.

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?

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