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.

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

Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.

I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.

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

Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

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

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

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.

God created… light anddark, heaven and hell—science claims the same thing as religion, that the Big Bang createdeverything in the universe with an opposite.“Including matter itself, antimatter

If it’s convenient to love you, you’re lying to someone about who you are or what you need.

Naive keeps on dreaming of heaven on earth, ignoring the truth that even heavens are at war.

My only policy is to profess evil and do good.

One minute you're up half a million in soybeans and the next, boom, your kids don't go to college and they've repossessed your Bentley.

There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.

It is essential to our interest and the security of our colonies that the several nations or tribes of Indians... who live under our protection, should not be molested or disturbed.

Prison itself is a tremendous education in the need for patience and perseverance. It is above all a test of one's commitment.

We can choose to throw stones, to stumble on them, to climb over them, or to build with them.