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

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

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.

Foucault was the one person I met in France that I could talk to. He was a mensch. You know whether you agree with him or not because you know what he is saying.

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

I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.

Of the female black authors, I really like Morrison's early books a lot. But she's really become so much a clone of Faulkner. He did it better.