-
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction.
Leslie Fiedler -
The middlebrow, I hate.
Leslie Fiedler
-
I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.
Leslie Fiedler -
The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
Leslie Fiedler -
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.
Leslie Fiedler -
Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.
Leslie Fiedler -
DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.
Leslie Fiedler -
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.
Leslie Fiedler
-
My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.
Leslie Fiedler -
I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.
Leslie Fiedler -
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.
Leslie Fiedler -
The novel is always pop art, and the novel is always dying. That's the only way it stays alive. It does really die. I've been thinking about that a lot.
Leslie Fiedler -
I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.
Leslie Fiedler -
One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
Leslie Fiedler
-
I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.
Leslie Fiedler -
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.
Leslie Fiedler -
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.
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.
Leslie Fiedler -
It's funny to be a critic.
Leslie Fiedler -
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.
Leslie Fiedler