Quotes By Leslie Fiedler

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 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.

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

The middlebrow, I hate.

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.

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

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

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.

Writers always know whether you like them or not.

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.

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

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.

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.