Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.

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

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.

It's funny to be a critic.

I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.

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.

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.