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.

Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.

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

The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

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.

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.