I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.
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.
There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.
There is a place in men's lives where pictures do in fact bleed, ghosts gibber and shriek, maidens run forever through mysterious landscapes from nameless foes; that place is, of course, the world of dreams and of the repressed guilts and fears that motivate them [i.e., the unconscious]. This world the dogmatic optimism and shallow psychology of the Age of Reason had denied; and yet this world it is the final, perhaps the essential, purpose of the gothic romance to assert.
I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.
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?
All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.
Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.
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.
My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.
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.
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.
The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.
The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction.
I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.
I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.
When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.
I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.
It's funny to be a critic.
When I was 12 years old, someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing and even then I knew I was having a great experience. It was as if somebody was moving through space like no one ever did before.
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.
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.
Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.
I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.
