Once, probably, I used to think that vagueness was a loftier kind of poetry, truer to the depths of consciousness, and maybe when I started to read mathematics and science back in the mid-70s I found an unexpected lyricism in the necessarily precise language that scientists tend to use My instinct, my superstition is that the closer I see a thing and the more accurately I describe it, the better my chances of arriving at a certain sensuality of expression.

— Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo Quotes

We have our self-importance. We also have our inadequacy. The former is a desperate invention of the latter.

— Don DeLillo

Pause for a moment, you wretched weakling, and take stock of yourself.

— Don DeLillo

It’s a Cadillac all right.” “The Rolls-Royce of automobiles,” Ottum.

— Don DeLillo

Billy couldn’t recall ever having seen a blind man laugh.

— Don DeLillo

There is another kind of belief, a second force, insecure, untrusting, a faith that is spring-fed by the things we fear in the night.

— Don DeLillo

We watched him use his spoon to mold the mashed potatoes on his plate into the shape of a volcanic mountain. He poured gravy ever so carefully into the opening at the top. Then he set to work ridding his steak of fat, veins and other imperfections. It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

— Don DeLillo

We can’t do justice to our dreams, reworking them in memory. They seem borrowed, part of another life, ours only maybe and only in the farthest margins.

— Don DeLillo

Have you ever seen so many people,” she whispered, “gathered in one place in order to be rich, powerful and disgusting together?

— Don DeLillo

Every lost moment is the life. It’s unknowable, except to us, each of us inexpressibly...

— Don DeLillo

He writes about mud and death and he makes me hungry.

— Don DeLillo

Don’t we know when a death is passing in the air?

— Don DeLillo

In time I let my head ease back on the top step and I closed my eyes. I was moving into the biblical phase of the afternoon, the peak of my new simplicity. A verity less than eternal had little appeal. I prepared myself to think of night, desert, sorrowful forests, of the moon, the stars, the west wind, baptismal mist and the rich myrrh of harvested earth. Instead I thought of tits.

— Don DeLillo

A Catholic gets it early. Incense, organ music, ashes on the forehead, wafer on the tongue. The best things shimmer with fear.

— Don DeLillo

We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.

— Don DeLillo

There were times when he felt the lure of a submoronic mode of being.

— Don DeLillo

This country is toilet-oriented.

— Don DeLillo

I was living, in short, on the edge of a landscape of vast shame.

— Don DeLillo

We have learned not to be afraid of the dark but we’ve forgotten that darkness means death.

— Don DeLillo

The dangerous secrets used to be held outside the government. Plots, conspiracies, secrets of revolution, secrets of the end of the social order. Now it’s the government that has a lock on the secrets that matter. All the danger is in the White House, from nuclear weapons on down.

— Don DeLillo

I moonlight, except there’s nothing I’m moonlighting from. Moonlight is all that’s out there.

— Don DeLillo
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