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

Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.

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

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

It's so wrong when I pick up a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and I look at the last page and it doesn't say, Yours truly, at the end.

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.

There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.