I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.

Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.

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

The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.

I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.

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.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.