Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.

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.

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

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

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

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

I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.