The middlebrow, I hate.

The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.

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.

The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.

When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.

Writers always know whether you like them or not.

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.

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?

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.

Foucault was the one person I met in France that I could talk to. He was a mensch. You know whether you agree with him or not because you know what he is saying.

Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn't yet historical.

I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.

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 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'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'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.

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.

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.

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.