Quotes By Leslie Fiedler

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.

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.

It's funny to be a critic.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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