I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.

Of the female black authors, I really like Morrison's early books a lot. But she's really become so much a clone of Faulkner. He did it better.

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.

The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.

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.

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