While preparing for class, I came across this 1991 interview with Don DeLillo, conducted by Vince Passaro:

DELILLO’S BOOKS ARE not friendly; they don’t “flatter the reader’s prejudices,” as Howard puts it. But if there is any comfort to be found in them, it is in that “moral force” of sentences coming out right. The architecture of DeLillo’s fiction — its formal harmonies, parallel devices and symmetries and the machine-tooled precision and conviction of its language — brings an odd pleasure no matter how unsettling the world it illumines. Everyone to whom I spoke about DeLillo noted this effect. Frank Lentricchia, a prominent critic and English professor at Duke University, has written about DeLillo and taught his novels in courses. He is the editor of a recent collection of essays about the author’s work called “Introducing Don DeLillo.” DeLillo’s writing, he says, “represents a rare achievement in American literature — the perfect weave of novelistic imagination and cultural criticism.”

It was in the course of this interview that DeLillo offered the following observation: “In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that’s filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.”