All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.

Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine and they would say this doesn't suit our needs precisely but on the other hand you sound interesting. Would you be interested in doing a review?

The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction.

When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.

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.

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.