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

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

Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn't yet historical.

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.

Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.

All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.

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