Don DeLillo Quotes

You convinced yourselves we're just a bunch of regular lads who got a bad break in life. Anything else would have cracked your dream open and made you face reality. Illusion is easy. Illusion is the loser's way out. Your way.

The masses think that is is easy to flee from reality, when it is the most difficult thing in the world.

Pretend hard enough and maybe it will go away.

'Ernest Borgnine' is sort of my version of Woody Allen's 'Purple Rose Of Cairo' in that it's about the occasional difficulty of coming to terms with the cold hard facts and the temptation to escape into another world - like movies, for example. I'm a pro at escaping.

Depending on the reality one must face, one may prefer to opt for illusion.

People don't want to hear the truth; they never do. They wanna live in some kind of fantasy.

I don't want to dig in the truth all of the time. Let me dream.

But I still did not realize how mad she was, and how accustomed to dreaming; and that she would not cry out for reality, rather would feed reality to her dreams, a demon elf feeding her spinning wheel with the reeds of the world so she might make her own weblike universe.

Dreams, dreams. I walk them; I live them. I delude myself with them. It's a wonder I can spot reality anymore.

Escape into the dream. Escape, a key thing charged against these drugs, that they are for escapists. I think the people who make this charge hardly dare dream to what degree they are escapist.

My greatest enemy is reality. I have fought it successfully for thirty years.

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

Some people have a difficult time facing truth and reality. They prefer to live in a make-believe world, pretending that certain things aren't happening.

In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

When all else fails there's always delusion.

We live in our fantasies and endure our realities.

You can have too much reality.

We are constantly - in order to cope with painful realities - shuffling through third-rate, half-remembered fantasies taken from movies, from TV, from people we admire. We do this individually, we do it collectively - we tell stories to escape our most painful truths.

The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.

Like all people who have nothing, I lived on dreams.

Most people cant' deal with reality, but indulge heavily in fantasy and fear.

Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn't there. If, however, you force him to look into it, he'll at once pretend that he sees the object not for what it is but for something that he would like it to be.

Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.

The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it.