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.
Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.
Of the female black authors, I really like Morrison's early books a lot. But she's really become so much a clone of Faulkner. He did it better.
I like that people who are not experts can not only understand but get engaged by my work. I like that Joe Paterno can read me. Bill Bradley.
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.
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.
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.
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.
DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.
Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
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.
I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.
I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.
I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.
Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn't yet historical.
I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.
The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.
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.
When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: