Writers always know whether you like them or not

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

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

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

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

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.
Leslie Fiedler

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.
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

Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.
Leslie Fiedler

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.
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

Writers always know whether you like them or not.
Leslie Fiedler

Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.
Leslie Fiedler

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

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