Quotes By Leslie Fiedler

I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.

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.

Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.

It's funny to be a critic.

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.

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.

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.

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.

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.

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?

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.

DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.

When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.

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.

I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.

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

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

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.

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

Writers always know whether you like them or not.

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

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.

Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.

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.

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