Leslie Fiedler Quotes

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

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

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

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.

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

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.

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

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

People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.

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

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.

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

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.

DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing.

Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.

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.

It's funny to be a critic.

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

I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.

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.

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

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.