The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

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

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

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

The novel is always pop art, and the novel is always dying. That's the only way it stays alive. It does really die. I've been thinking about that a lot.

Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.

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.