Don DeLillo Quotes

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

Source: White Noise: Text and Criticism

Don DeLillo The Day Room

Source: The Day Room

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

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

Source: White Noise (1984)

“War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.”

Source: End Zone (1972), Ch. 19

“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.”

Source: End Zone (1972), Ch. 16

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

Source: White Noise

Don DeLillo Quotes about the world

Don DeLillo book The Body Artist

Source: The Body Artist

“When he died he would not end. The world would end.”

Don DeLillo book Cosmopolis

Source: Cosmopolis

“For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.”

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

Source: White Noise

“Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.”

Source: White Noise (1984)

“He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.”

Source: Conversations with 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 Quotes about thinking

Don DeLillo book Cosmopolis

Source: Cosmopolis

“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.”

“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.”

Source: White Noise (1984)

Don DeLillo Mao II

Part 1, Ch. 3
Source: Mao II (1991)
Context: 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.

“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.”

“I think fiction rescues history from its confusions.”

Source: White Noise (1984)

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

'"An Outsider in this Society": An Interview with Don DeLillo' by Anthony DeCurtis, South Atlantic Quarterly, #89, No.2, 1988

Don DeLillo book The Names

Source: The Names (1982), Ch. 1

Don DeLillo: Trending quotes

“The prospect of a humane war may be hideous and all the other names you can think of, but it's still a prospect. And as an alternative to all the other things that could happen in the event of war, it's relatively acceptable.”

“I think what'll happen in the not-too-distant future is that we'll have humane wars.”

Source: End Zone (1972), Ch. 16
Context: Of course the humanistic mind crumbles at the whole idea. It's the most hideous thing in the world to these people that such ideas even have to be mentioned. But the thing won't go away. The thing is here and you have to face it. The prospect of a humane war may be hideous and all the other names you can think of, but it's still a prospect. And as an alternative to all the other things that could happen in the event of war, it's relatively acceptable.