Quotes

I am Zero Mostel.

Anti-Semitism is an inescapable interest, though I have never suffered it personally. My four grandparents and many other relatives were murdered in the Shoah.

[on the writer Jose Saramago in 2008] Saramago for the last 25 years stood his own with any novelist of the Western world. He was the equal of Philip Roth, Gunther Grass, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. His genius was remarkably versatile--he was at once a great comic and a writer of shocking earnestness and grim poignancy. It is hard to believe he will not survive.

Stephen King is Cervantes compared to David Foster Wallace. [Wallace] can't think, he can't write. There's no discernible talent.

[describing himself] He is philologically trained in the history of the language, and in Greek and Latin, and the other tongues that contribute to the apprehension of American literature, poetry. And in particular, he has an incredible passion, a fierce love for the real splendor of the sublime. I am not Tolstoy. But I have love for books. They have become a part of me.

[on critics of his work] I'm always being denounced. A few years ago I named all these people: the pseudo-feminists, the pseudo-Marxists, the pseudo-power-and-gender freaks, as I call them. I call them all, in capital letters, the School of Resentment.

My one distinction that I would crave as a teacher is that no two of my students resemble one another, or resemble me in any way whatsoever. Ralph Waldo Emerson, my great hero, once said, 'That which I gain from another is never instruction but only provocation.