813 Quotes by 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.

To have true socialism, he said, we first establish capitalism, totally and heartlessly, and then destroy it by degrees, bury it in the sea.

Pleasure is not diversion but urgent life, a social order perceived as temporary.

What are the people like? Do the women wear plaid skirts, cable-knit sweaters? Are the men in hacking jackets? What’s a hacking jacket?” “They’ve grown comfortable with their money,” I said. “They genuinely believe they’re entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.” “I have trouble imagining death at that income level,” she said. “Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.

There’s a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.

Is it very different at home, or on the street, or waiting at the gate to board a flight? I maintain myself on the puppet drug of personal technology. Every touch of a button brings the neural rush of finding something I never knew and never needed to know until it appears at my anxious fingertips, where it remains for a shaky second before disappearing forever.

Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck. Things have no limits now. Money has no limits. I don’t understand money anymore. Money is undone. Violence is undone, violence is easier now, it’s uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values.

Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I’m a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.

Talent is more erotic when it’s wasted.