"The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also to mean something else."

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I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.

— Don DeLillo