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.

The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.

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

I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.

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.

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

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.