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

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.

There is a place in men's lives where pictures do in fact bleed, ghosts gibber and shriek, maidens run forever through mysterious landscapes from nameless foes; that place is, of course, the world of dreams and of the repressed guilts and fears that motivate them [i.e., the unconscious]. This world the dogmatic optimism and shallow psychology of the Age of Reason had denied; and yet this world it is the final, perhaps the essential, purpose of the gothic romance to assert.

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

Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.

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.