Quotes from Leslie Fiedler

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

What I really dream of is that somebody would blow everything I've done out of the water in a beautiful way, which would clear the way for something better to come along.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I love it now that a large minority of people who are handicapped prefer to call themselves crippled. This is all part of the game, like queer theory.

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

Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.

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

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

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

The middlebrow, I hate.

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.

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.

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

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

I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.

Writers always know whether you like them or not.