Activity

For three days we worked on the proofs of his novel. He read aloud, I wielded the pencil. I was once again impressed and moved by the book’s sweep, its intricacy, its flow of ideas. And also surprised by the way his imagination seems to dwell forever in the 1950s. His efforts to get inside a woman’…

He questioned me about why I was ‘a jealous person’, and what I thought jealousy was. I said it was a panic, a terrible fear of being rejected or replaced. I said that one of the things I loved in Proust was his brilliant, hilarious accuracy about jealousy and his intense interest in it. V said he …

V admires a pair of grotesquely high heels that Marilyn Monroe is wearing in a photo. I look at them and see two instruments of torture. He speaks at some length about how women who wear high heels are showing that they like men, that they’re prepared to ‘put up with a bit of discomfort’ to please …

Don DeLillo, interviewed by David Remnick in the New Yorker: ‘Between books,’ he says, ‘what happens is, I drift. I feel a little aimless. I feel a little stupid, because my mind is at odds. It’s not trained on a daily basis to concentrate on something, so I feel a little dumb. Time passes in a com…

He says he can’t talk to me any more, that I keep correcting everything he says, that I’ve got a list of subjects that I don’t want to hear about any more.

I say it’s because he never has anything new to say on those subjects, and only rants and fulminates—how boring young people are, the worthl…