One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.
The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.
The cultural decoding that many American writers require has become an even harder task in the age of globalisation. The experience they describe has grown more private; its essential background, the busy larger world, has receded.
It used to be that the highest ambition of American novelists was to write 'the Great American Novel,' that great white whale of American fiction that would encompass all the American experience in one great book.
Since its beginnings, American writing has been in dialogue with other literatures.
Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.
Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.
The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into all of those places where you shouldn't.
I'm not expecting the American literary community to welcome me with open arms. To them I'm just some schmuck kid who wrote some book.