Leslie Fiedler Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.
-
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.
-
I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.
-
I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper.
-
The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.
-
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'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.
-
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?
-
When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.
-
Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.
-
There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.
-
Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.
-
I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.
-
Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
-
Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.
-
When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The middlebrow, I hate.