 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. |
| When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King. |
| 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. |
| The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along. |
| The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading. |
| I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis. |
| One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies. |
| I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love. |
| When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer. |
| All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science. |
| 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. |
| The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans. |
| I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature. |
| I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
