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.

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

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.

Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.

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.

Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.