Leslie Fiedler Quotes

• To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Come Back To The Raft Again, Huck Honey!

  Leslie Fiedler

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Writers always know whether you like them or not.

  Leslie Fiedler

• When somebody asks me what I do, I don’t think I’d say critic. I say writer.

  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

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

  Leslie Fiedler

• 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.

  Leslie Fiedler

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

  Leslie Fiedler

• The reason Saul Bellow doesn’t talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

  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

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

  Leslie Fiedler

• The middlebrow, I hate.

  Leslie Fiedler

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

  Leslie Fiedler

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

  Leslie Fiedler

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

  Leslie Fiedler

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

  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

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

  Leslie Fiedler

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

  Leslie Fiedler

Leslie Fiedler (48)

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

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Today's Anniversary - 22nd December

Births

• 1960 - Luther Campbell
• 1889 - B. Carroll Reece
• 1952 - Robert McChesney
• 1962 - Mark Ruffalo
• 1905 - Kenneth Rexroth

Deaths

• 1943 - Beatrix Potter
• 1989 - Samuel Beckett
• 1998 - Virginia Graham
• 1940 - Nathanael West
• 1987 - Sir Henry Thomas Cotton