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.

It's funny to be a critic.

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

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

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.

I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.