Leslie Fiedler Quotes

• 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

• 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

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

  Leslie Fiedler

• I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.

  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

• 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

• If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction.

  Leslie Fiedler

• It’s funny to be a critic.

  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

• 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

• Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.

  Leslie Fiedler

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

  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

• One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

  Leslie Fiedler

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

  Leslie Fiedler

• Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.

  Leslie Fiedler

• The black situation has changed. They finally realized they’re Americans.

  Leslie Fiedler

• The middlebrow, I hate.

  Leslie Fiedler

• The novel doesn’t come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.

  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

Leslie Fiedler (48)

Birth:	8th March, 1917
Death:	29th January, 2003
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Critic

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• Anthony Holden
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• Friedrich Nietzsche
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• Sir Herbert Edward Read
• Frank O'Hara
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Today's Anniversary - 24th April

Births

• 1904 - Willem de Kooning
• 1969 - Renee Zellweger
• 1973 - Lee Westwood
• 1916 - Lou Thesz
• 1960 - Dr. Robert Anthony

Deaths

• 1947 - Willa Sibert Cather
• 1976 - Mark Tobey
• 1986 - Wallis Simpson
• 1980 - Alejo Carpentier
• 1942 - Lucy Maud Montgomery