Leslie Fiedler

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

“I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.”

“When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's funny to be a critic.”

“I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.”

“Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”