Don DeLillo Quotes

When God sneezed, I didn't know what to say.

Now, most dentist's chairs go up and down, don't they? The one I was in went back and forwards. I thought 'This is unusual'. And the dentist said to me 'Mr Vine, get out of the filing cabinet.

Talking to my wife, we stare at each other, saying, 'How is this happening? Why is this happening? Why now?' It's nothing I ever aspired to.

Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.

Houston, we've had a problem.

'Shocking' is like a bolt from the blue. It is something external that ruptures your world.

I'd heard of the name 'Big Brother' before. I didn't realize that it was on TV for 20 years. My manager told me, ''Big Brother' wants you.' I said, 'I don't feel like watching it, and I don't know what I'm getting into.'

That gets me upset- you're jamming along, checking out the crowd and having a good time, and then your equipment goes down. You can't just stop the show and say, 'Oh, Jeff's got a guitar problem.'

We have seen things in the twentieth century like the ATM machine, the VCR, and even the car. The electric car was invented in 1920, and here we, 100 years later, it is only now becoming an actual thing. So it doesn't surprise me that new ideas are met with a lot of questions.

One operator is no big deal. That can be fixed in a jiffy.

I didn't know anything about it, I swear. Nor did Dave Bassett. We were sitting there saying 'What's happening here?'. It is frightening. A nightmare.

Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry.

In all earnestness I asked myself what kind of world I had stumbled into.

Escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.

The Unexpected always comes at the most awkward times.

I always want people to be confused, to be shocked or realize something later.

There is much unexplained in the world. It behooves us to be wary at all times. Just when you think you've got the hang of it, along comes string theory, collateralized debt obligations or Björk's new album, and bam! You're as confused as you were when you first started.

I just stood there staring, because while I've seen a lot of weird things, I hadn't ever seen that.

An accident, a random change, in any delicate mechanism can hardly be expected to improve it. Poking a stick into the machinery of one's watch or one's radio set will seldom make it work better.

I do not know what to say in a case so surprising, so unlooked for and so novel.

And what in the name of Merlin’s most baggy Y Fronts was that about?

I was in a tailspin of confusion I hadn't experienced since the first time I heard George W. Bush speak.

My God. What's happened?

Rincewind gave his fingers a long shocked stare, as one might regard a gun that has been hanging on the wall for decades and has suddenly gone off and perforated the cat.

Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.