''At first,'' Mr. DeLillo says, ''I had no intention of using excerpts from Tap's novel. But as the novel drew to a close I simply could not resist. It seemed to insist on being used. Rather than totally invent a piece of writing that a 9-year-old boy might do, I looked at some of the work that Atticus had done when he was 9. And I used it. I used half a dozen sentences from Atticus's work. More important, the simple exuberance of his work helped me to do the last pages of the novel. In other words, I stole from a kid.''

Young Atticus is given ample credit in the book's acknowledgments, but creative borrowing from life is not a new technique for Mr. DeLillo, who has been praised for his ear for dialogue. ''The interesting thing about trying to set down dialogue realistically,'' he says, ''is that if you get it right it sounds stylized. Why is it so difficult to see clearly and to hear clearly? I don't know. But it is, and in 'Players' I listened very carefully to people around me. People in buses. People in the street. And in many parts of the book I used sentences that I heard literally, word for word. Yet it didn't sound as realistic as one might expect. It sounded over-refined even.''

FOR three years while writing ''The Names'' Mr. DeLillo lived in Greece and traveled through the Middle East and India. ''What I found,'' he says, ''was that all this traveling taught me how to see and hear all over again. Whatever ideas about language may be in 'The Names,' I think the most important thing is what I felt in hearing people and watching them gesture - in listening to the sound of Greek and Arabic and Hindi and Urdu. The simple fact that I was confronting new landscapes and fresh languages made me feel almost duty bound to get it right. I would see and hear more clearly than I could in more familiar places.''

Living abroad also gave Mr. DeLillo a fresh perspective on the United States. ''The thing that's interesting about living in another country,'' he says, ''is that it's difficult to forget you're an American. The actions of the American Government won't let you. They make you self-conscious, make you aware of yourself as an American. You find yourself mixed up in world politics in more subtle ways than you're accustomed to. On the one hand, you're aware of America's blundering in country after country. And on the other hand, you're aware of the way in which people in other countries have created the myth of America, of the way in which they use America to relieve their own fears and guilt by blaming America automatically for anything that goes wrong.''

Critic Diane Johnson has written that Mr. DeLillo's books have gone unread because ''they deal with deeply shocking things about America that people would rather not face.''

''I do try to confront realities,'' Mr. DeLillo responds. ''But people would rather read about their own marriages and separations and trips to Tanglewood. There's an entire school of American fiction which might be called around-the-house-and-in-the-yard. And I think people like to read this kind of work because it adds a certain luster, a certain significance to their own lives.''

THE writer to whom Mr. DeLillo has most often been likened and for whom he has great respect is Thomas Pynchon. ''Somebody quoted Norman Mailer as saying that he wasn't a better writer because his contemporaries weren't better,'' he says. ''I don't know whether he really said that or not, but the point I want to make is that no one in Pynchon's generation can make that statement. If we're not as good as we should be it's not because there isn't a standard. And I think Pynchon, more than any other writer, has set the standard. He's raised the stakes.''