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.

I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper.

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

When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.

Of the female black authors, I really like Morrison's early books a lot. But she's really become so much a clone of Faulkner. He did it better.

When I was 12 years old, someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing and even then I knew I was having a great experience. It was as if somebody was moving through space like no one ever did before.

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.