Rafe Bartholomew interviewing Don DeLillo for Grantland:

In your 1993 interview for The Paris Review, you described language this way: "… the sheer pleasure of making it and bending it and seeing it form on the page and hearing it whistle in my head." This reminds me of sports, the feeling we get when we're absorbed in the game and really playing well. Do you think sports and writing have some common, creative core?

When the work is going well, it can reach a level of spontaneity and unpredictability that is exhilarating — but it doesn't make the writer (not this writer anyway) pound the tabletop. It's an interior sense of satisfaction that's often so fleeting it can't be relived (or even remembered) when the writer revisits the page in a more critical mood the next day or six months later.

Since I've somewhat decided to sneak bits and pieces about my next book into my comings and goings in this space, well—let's just say this interview (originally published in 2011) helped me a lot.

And also—Don DeLillo.

Joe Stracci