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.

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

I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.

Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.

I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.