I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.
All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.
There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.
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 like that people who are not experts can not only understand but get engaged by my work. I like that Joe Paterno can read me. Bill Bradley.
I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.
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 have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.
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.
Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.
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?
The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.
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.
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.
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.
Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.
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.
The middlebrow, I hate.
