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

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

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.

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

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

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction.

I've had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn't really pay off.