I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.

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.

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.

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

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.

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