Falling man

"The work gets slower, that's for sure. This latest book took me nearly four years to write and it's not even 300 pages. It's not a burden, it's just day-to-day. But at some point I realised I'd been sitting there for four years. Why isn't it a bigger book?"

-- Don DeLillo interviewed by Xan Brooks for The Guardian

A cookie full of arsenic

Don LeLillo in the Wall Street Journal, 2010:

It's tougher to be a young writer today than when I was a young writer. I don't think my first novel would have been published today as I submitted it. I don't think an editor would have read 50 pages of it. It was very overdone and shaggy, but two young editors saw something that seemed worth pursuing and eventually we all did some work on the book and it was published. I don't think publishers have that kind of tolerance these days, and I guess possibly as a result, more writers go to writing class now than then. I think first, fiction, and second, novels, are much more refined in terms of language, but they may tend to be too well behaved, almost in response to the narrower market.

Kurt Vonnegut in the 1977 Paris Review interview:

INTERVIEWER: Should young writers be subsidized?

VONNEGUT: Something's got to be done, now that free enterprise has made it impossible for them to support themselves through free enterprise.

On writing

Sam Anderson at New York Magazine on Don DeLillo's new novel Point Omega:

Over the last ten years, Don DeLillo has become determined to solve one of the great riddles of the ancient art of storytelling: What is the slowest speed at which a plot can move before it stops moving altogether, thereby ceasing to function as a plot?...You could even say it’s something of a breakthrough: It brings us, in just over 100 pages, as close to pure stasis as we’re ever likely to get.

And here's Pete Dexter, in a 2007 interview about writing true stories:

I think your instinct has to be to confront. If you're the kind of guy that comes to a peaceful lake and you know there's birds floating around on it and it's early morning or something and you're happy just standing there looking at that beautiful sight, then maybe you're a photographer.