Leslie Fiedler Quotes
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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.
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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.
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The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.
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I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.
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Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.
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Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
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All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.
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One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
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When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.
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Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.
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Writers always know whether you like them or not.