Faulkner turned out to be a great teacher. When a student asked a question ineptly, he answered the question with what the student had really wanted to know.

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

I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.

I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.

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.

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.

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.