I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.

To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.

I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.

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.

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

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.

I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.