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.

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

I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.

I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.

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

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

There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.