Quotes by Leslie Fiedler

• It's so wrong when I pick up a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and I look at the last page and it doesn't say, Yours truly, at the end.
• Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.
• Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.
• One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
• 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.
• My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.
• Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
• It's funny to be a critic.
• 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.
• The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
• 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.
• 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.
• The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.
• There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.
• 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.
• When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.
• 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.
• When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.
• If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that 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.
• Writers always know whether you like them or not.
• I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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?
• DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.
• Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.
• 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.
• 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.
• Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
• All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.
• 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.
• I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.
• 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.
• I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.
• I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.
• I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.
• 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.
• I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.
• I used to be fond of Indian arm 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.
• 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.