I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

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

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

Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.

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 admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.

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.