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 Quote

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 Quote

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

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

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

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 Quote

I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.
- Leslie Fiedler Quote

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 Quote

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.
- Leslie Fiedler Quote

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

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 Quote

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 Quote

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction.
- Leslie Fiedler Quote

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 Quote

Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
- Leslie Fiedler Quote

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 Quote

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
- Leslie Fiedler Quote

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

The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.
- Leslie Fiedler Quote

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

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 Quote

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

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

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

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 Quote

When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.
- Leslie Fiedler Quote