The reason Saul Bellow doesn’t talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.
Raymond Carver is good. I think he’ll be appreciated more and more. He’s an easy writer to imitate.
It’s funny to be a critic.
Of the female black authors, I really like Morrison’s early books a lot. But she’s really become so much a clone of Faulkner. He did it better.
When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.
I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.
It’s so wrong when I pick up a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and I look at the last page and it doesn’t say, Yours truly, at the end.
Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
The novel is always pop art, and the novel is always dying. That’s the only way it stays alive. It does really die. I’ve been thinking about that a lot.
The black situation has changed. They finally realized they’re Americans.
The novel doesn’t come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
When somebody asks me what I do, I don’t think I’d say critic. I say writer.
One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.
When I was 12 years old, someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing and even then I knew I was having a great experience. It was as if somebody was moving through space like no one ever did before.
I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.
I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.
Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.
Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.
I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.