The middlebrow, I hate. |
I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper. |
I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk. |
Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine and they would say this doesn't suit our needs precisely but on the other hand you sound interesting. Would you be interested in doing a review? |
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. |
Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate. |
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 think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake. |
Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein. |
Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish. |
I've had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn't really pay off. |
My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time. |
It's funny to be a critic. |
Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible. |
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction. |
Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend. |
I love it now that a large minority of people who are handicapped prefer to call themselves crippled. This is all part of the game, like queer theory. |
I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling. |
Writers always know whether you like them or not. |
There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola. |