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.

I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.

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

I like that people who are not experts can not only understand but get engaged by my work. I like that Joe Paterno can read me. Bill Bradley.

Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish.

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.

Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.