Quotes By Leslie Fiedler

The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.

Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.

I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.

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.

The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

Writers always know whether you like them or not.

The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.

I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.

I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

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.

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.

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.

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction.

I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.

All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The middlebrow, I hate.

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.

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.

There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.

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.

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.

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.

I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.