Leslie Fiedler Quotes

• 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

• 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

• It’s funny to be a critic.

  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

• 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

• 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 used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.

  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 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 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 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.

  Leslie Fiedler

• I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.

  Leslie Fiedler

• I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.

  Leslie Fiedler

• 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

• I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.

  Leslie Fiedler

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

  Leslie Fiedler

• 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

• 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

• 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.

  Leslie Fiedler

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

  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

• 1948 - Martin Yan
• 1970 - Ted Cruz
• 1831 - Mark Rutherford
• 1948 - Steve Garvey
• 1944 - Steve Carlton

Deaths

• 2001 - Lance Loud
• 1906 - Robert Rainy
• 1940 - Nathanael West
• 1989 - Samuel Beckett
• 1899 - Dwight L. Moody