Quotes By Leslie Fiedler

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.

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.

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.

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