Text of DeLillo's Acceptance Speech of Jerusalem Prize

[Jeremy Osner]

Richard: this is the first three paragraphs of the speech. I am
not understanding it very well, perhaps I will take it up again
later on.

Jeremy

DELILLO

The Fool in his Room

A great American author tells of the loneliness of writing

by Don DeLillo

A novel is a secret, which an author sometimes keeps for years
before he lets it out of his room. He works in solitude. He looks
at the wall or stands at the window, abandons himself to the
feeling of time-which-erases. His mouth is open. He takes a
finger and sticks it in his ear. A supervision-video of the
author would stimulate some knocking down about the dynamic of
human endeavors.

He begins something new and lives within the borders of a glassy
stare. Sometimes he capsules himself off week- or monthlong,
sculpts sentence on sentence, provisionally. He leaves the city
and goes to the country. Some friendlier, some quainter place --
in these words resonates doubt.

However far away, however solitary, no, alienated he may be, so
weakly the pulse of this sunken-in-itself beginning beats, on
some level the author knows that the monstrous social reality
vibrating around him shapes his work.