Top 30 Leslie Fiedler Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

It’s funny to be a critic.

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

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.

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

I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.

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.

Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.