When I was 12 years old, someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing and even then I knew I was having a great experience. It was as if somebody was moving through space like no one ever did before.

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

I've had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn't really pay off.

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

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

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.

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