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.

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.

I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.

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

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

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.

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.