Leslie Fiedler Quotes

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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?"

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

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