Kae Tempest: What is the purpose of a novel?
Don DeLillo: The immediate purpose is to satisfy the writer’s need to express themselves. He has to write, she has to write. Why does it take this particular form? I guess it goes back to ancient storytelling, which can be poetry and can be fiction of a kind. I started with short stories. I wasn’t even remotely ready to write anything longer. And my short stories were quite limited in scope. They were geographically limited – I came from a certain area in the Bronx and that’s what I wrote about. And eventually, the focus expanded and it really happened in the course of writing my first novel. The novel taught me how to write and it took forever. It took thirty years I think, and when it was done I felt I was a writer. Which was an enormous kind of gratification for me because I hadn’t known this.
