What I really dream of is that somebody would blow everything I've done out of the water in a beautiful way, which would clear the way for something better to come along.
There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.
Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.
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.
Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.
I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.
Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
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 turned out to be a great teacher. When a student asked a question ineptly, he answered the question with what the student had really wanted to know.
The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. That's what makes it different from both high art and folk art.
I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.
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.
Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.
Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.
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 novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.
Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.
The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.
