813 Quotes by Don DeLillo

The falling away of things we carry around with us, twilight and chimney smoke.

He was a foreigner here. There was no profit in discontent. He could not apply his bitterness. It was American-made and had no local standing. For the first time he realized what a dangerous thing he’d done, leaving his country. He struggled against this awareness. He hated knowing something he didn’t want to know.

It’s not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.

News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before – what? I don’t know. But you’re smart to trap us in your camera before we disappear.

Was he at the movies to see a movie, she said, or maybe more narrowly, more essentially, simply to be at the movies?

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

The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence. Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God.

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.

I know it’s thankless to be sensible in the face of someone’s primitive distrust.