Leslie Fiedler Quotes

"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 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?"

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"It's funny to be a critic."

"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."

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

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

"Writers always know whether you like them or not."

"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."

"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."

"Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein."

"I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis."