It's so wrong when I pick up a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and I look at the last page and it doesn't say, Yours truly, at the end.

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction.

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

Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

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

The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.