He himself has said you can follow the patterns and real events in his life by reading his books, which doesn’t mean you can figure out his life by reading his books. Simply that the...

If I had to put my money on it, … I’d say he’s not going to read it. He might leaf through it. He’s not going to sit down and read it.

If I could answer a critic, people like James Shapiro in the New York Times say that I extrapolate the life too directly and explicitly from the work,

An account of some of these acts makes Henry Miller’s crudest imaginations seem as chaste as a nun’s diary.

She’s a very conservative person and has exceedingly good judgment. Usually, she’s telling me, ‘Don’t do this! Mistake.’ And this time, she said, ‘I really think you should write this book, whether he wants you...

He describes himself as a mild depressive, and he goes through just terrible suffering, much of it self-generated. And yet he’s also an extremely buoyant person who finds a great deal in life to entertain...

I doubt the garrulous archive bequeathed us by the tape recorder will prove as memorable as Henry James’s thank-you notes.

A penumbra of somber dignity has descended over his reputation.

He’s someone who experiences a certain amount of bafflement about his talents. How did it happen? How did he become who he is?

Biographers, we’re weird. For whatever reasons of conditioning, our temporal sense is different from other people’s, and I knew it would take 10 years. And that’s just the way it is.

I had no reports which described him as a stud,

In writing this book I’m writing about my own life, a generation removed. But in the larger sense … it was my discovery of Bellow’s work, his voice that became for me the inspiration for...

To read Wilson… is to be instructed and amused in the highest sense – that is, to be educated.