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

Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish.

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.

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.

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.

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

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