Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

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

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

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

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.

When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.

I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.