A biography for Leslie Fiedlerhasn’t been written yet.
“I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.”
“When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.”
“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.”
“I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.”
“The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.”
“Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.”
“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.”
“DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.”
“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.”
“Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.”
“If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction.”
“All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.”
“The middlebrow, I hate.”
“One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.”