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

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

It's funny to be a critic.

DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.

I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.

There is a place in men's lives where pictures do in fact bleed, ghosts gibber and shriek, maidens run forever through mysterious landscapes from nameless foes; that place is, of course, the world of dreams and of the repressed guilts and fears that motivate them [i.e., the unconscious]. This world the dogmatic optimism and shallow psychology of the Age of Reason had denied; and yet this world it is the final, perhaps the essential, purpose of the gothic romance to assert.

When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.