Fiedler Quotes

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

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

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

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.
Leslie Fiedler

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.
Leslie Fiedler

I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.
Leslie Fiedler

To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.
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

There is a place in men's lives where pictures do in fact bleed, ghosts gibber and shriek, maidens run forever through mysterious landscapes from nameless foes; that place is, of course, the world of dreams and of the repressed guilts and fears that motivate them [i.e., the unconscious]. This world the dogmatic optimism and shallow psychology of the Age of Reason had denied; and yet this world it is the final, perhaps the essential, purpose of the gothic romance to assert.
Leslie Fiedler

I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.
Leslie Fiedler

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

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.
Leslie Fiedler

It's funny to be a critic.
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

Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
Leslie Fiedler

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?
Leslie Fiedler

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

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

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.
Leslie Fiedler

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.
Leslie Fiedler

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

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.
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

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


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