Leslie Fiedler Quotes

"The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Americans)

"Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Friend, Advice)

"Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Writer)

"One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like."
- Leslie Fiedler

"Of the female black authors, I really like Morrison's early books a lot. But she's really become so much a clone of Faulkner. He did it better."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Books)

"My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Time, Truth, Writer)

"Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Thought, Writer)

"It's funny to be a critic."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Funny)

"The middlebrow, I hate."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Hate)

"Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: End, Magic, Past, Present, Wonder)

"The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Existence, Fiction)

"The novel is always pop art, and the novel is always dying. That's the only way it stays alive. It does really die. I've been thinking about that a lot."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Art, Dying, Thinking)

"The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. That's what makes it different from both high art and folk art."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Art, First, Folk)

"The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Reading, Reason, Talk, Worth)

"There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: American, Class, Clothes, Culture, Want)

"What I really dream of is that somebody would blow everything I've done out of the water in a beautiful way, which would clear the way for something better to come along."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Dream, Water)

"When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: People, Will)

"When I was 12 years old, someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing and even then I knew I was having a great experience. It was as if somebody was moving through space like no one ever did before."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Experience, Thought, Dancing, Nothing, Old, Space, Years)

"When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Writer)

"If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Direction)

"Foucault was the one person I met in France that I could talk to. He was a mensch. You know whether you agree with him or not because you know what he is saying."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: France, Saying, Talk)

"Writers always know whether you like them or not."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Writers)

"I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Friend, Enemies, Writing)

"I've had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn't really pay off."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Time, First)

"Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish."
- Leslie Fiedler

"Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: American, English, Sense)

"Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine and they would say this doesn't suit our needs precisely but on the other hand you sound interesting. Would you be interested in doing a review?"
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Needs, Sound)

"DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Nothing, Writing)

"Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Light, Living)

"Faulkner turned out to be a great teacher. When a student asked a question ineptly, he answered the question with what the student had really wanted to know."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Question)

"Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn't yet historical."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Funny, People)

"Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Thought)

"All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Art, History, Science, Criticism)

"I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Being, Fact, Poems, Will)

"I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Tolerance)

"I like that people who are not experts can not only understand but get engaged by my work. I like that Joe Paterno can read me. Bill Bradley."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Work, People, Experts)

"I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Talk)

"I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Love, Voice)

"I love it now that a large minority of people who are handicapped prefer to call themselves crippled. This is all part of the game, like queer theory."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Love, People, Minority, Now, Theory)

"I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Life, People, Want)

"I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Sex, American, Force, Influence, Literature, Publishing)

"I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Funny)

"I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Wrestling)

"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."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Man, Old, Writer, Writing, Years)

"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."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Books)