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

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

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.

The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

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.