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

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.

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.

Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.

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

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