“Do you have any idea what made you a writer?” ”I have an idea but I’m not sure I believe it. Maybe I wanted to learn how to think. Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.”
From an interview of Don DeLillo by Adam Begley that is part of The Paris Review’s decades-spanning archive of “The Art of Fiction” pieces (available online at www.theparisreview.org/interviews).