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.

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

Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.

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

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.

Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.