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

Faulkner turned out to be a great teacher. When a student asked a question ineptly, he answered the question with what the student had really wanted to know.

I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.

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

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

To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.

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