Quotes from Leslie Fiedler

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The existence of overt homosexuality threatens to compromise an essential aspect of American sentimental life: the camaraderie of the locker room and ball park, the good fellowship of the poker game and fishing trip, a kind of passionless passion, at once gross and delicate, homoerotic in the boy's sense, possessing an innocence above suspicion.

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

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

It's funny to be a critic.