Dum Pendebat Filius

An interview with Don DeLillo at Guernica magazine.

Don DeLillo: Absolutely. I was thinking about the impact of history on the smallest details of ordinary life, and I wanted to see if I could trace an individual’s interior life, day-by-day and thought-by-thought. It occurs to me that this could be the novelist’s initiative, even more than the story — to find the smallest intimate moments that people experience and share in conversation. I had none of this in mind. I just wanted to get the characters clear and, over time, create a balance, rhythm, repetition. This is what became satisfying to me. I was writing out of sequence and then began to fit the parts together and, as I say, look for these balances and the way in which the past yields the presence and vice versa. Sometimes this is what I think novelists do that makes them similar to painters. Abstract painters in particular. Looking for things in one part of a canvas that echo things in another part of a canvas.

(via Don DeLillo’s America)