Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.
When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.
Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.
The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.
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.