One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

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

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.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.

The novel is always pop art, and the novel is always dying. That's the only way it stays alive. It does really die. I've been thinking about that a lot.

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