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've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper.

Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn't yet historical.

DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.

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

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

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.