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

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.

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 so wrong when I pick up a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and I look at the last page and it doesn't say, Yours truly, at the end.

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

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.

Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.