One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

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.

I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.

Power is like being a lady... if you have to tell people you are, you aren't.

a greater evil than the restoration of the Bourbons to the world in general, and England in particular, can hardly happen.

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.

If you can sing it, you can play it.

Thinking that everything is going to come together in a perfect way is not necessarily the way it's going to happen.

If someone at Fleet Farm offers you assistance and they don't work there you might live in Wisconsin.

Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively.

We all want heroes and we all want somebody to look up to.