Now if you’re a human being, you probably realize that it’s possible for you to degenerate into a beast; people who don’t acknowledge this have actually degenerated in a different way, have lost a certain amount of self insight. And you can regress into being an ape, if that’s what you really want to do.
“Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I’ve always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There’s a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer’s will to live.”
Don DeLillo | Mao II