[O]ne does not write a truly contemporary novel […] merely by writing about contemporary matters. […] One writes a contemporary novel by writing it in a contemporary way.

The contemporary fiction I read is mostly by Black, queer, and Black and queer writers. There are some extraordinary people working right now and there are scenes in literary fiction being published that I know wouldn’t have been published five years ago. But they probably would have 45 years ago. Tommy Orange, Torrey Peters, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Maisy Card are all extraordinary. Art is cyclical – it’s less about getting better, and more about looking for those books and pieces that have always done what I described above – inviting people into a conversation, always going deeper. They’re out there. They just aren’t necessarily a part of “the canon” and definitely aren’t regularly taught to others. Simone Schwarz-Bart’s The Bridge of Beyond; Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven; Carlene Hatcher Polite’s The Flagellants are all books like this.

The big contemporary novel is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, and these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion.

Any literature, when it arrives at being good literature, transcends genre.

the contemporary novel . . . I've read one or two: Rushdie, I've enjoyed, again, exceptionally, Marquez, I love his works: that's another exception. Bessie Head: I found her novels very, very gripping, fascinating, challenging, really intellectually intriguing. Then that black American woman writer, Toni Morrison, the author of Sula, Song of Solomon: she's a fascinating writer. Umberto Eco . . . But generally I don't read novels.

...All literature in some degree, exists to reveal a more powerful and passionate, a more divine world than ours.

There's so much more to a book than just the reading.

The point is not that contemporaneity is insignificant. ... It is rather that there is something more important at stake in the temporal character of literature: its relation to history, understood as change and development, rather than as context and frame.

All literature is contemporary to the reader who knows how to read.

Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers — such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.

...the single ingredient in American literature that distinguishes it from other literatures of the world is a kind of giddy, illogical hopefulness. It is quite technically sophisticated while remaining ideologically naïve.

Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

But literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature. It wants and strives, beyond that artifact part of itself, to be a true part of the composite human record — that is, not words but a reality.