I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.

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?

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.

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.

I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.