When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.

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

Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine and they would say this doesn't suit our needs precisely but on the other hand you sound interesting. Would you be interested in doing a review?

Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.

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.

Foucault was the one person I met in France that I could talk to. He was a mensch. You know whether you agree with him or not because you know what he is saying.

Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.