Leslie Fiedler Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Leslie Fiedler

  Love, Voice, Long

  "Leslie Fiedler Dies at 85; Provocative Literary Critic" by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, www.nytimes.com. January 31, 2003.

  56 Copy quote

• 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

  Destiny, America, Imagine

  9 Copy quote

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

  Leslie Fiedler

  Clothes, America, Blue

  67 Copy quote

• There is a place in men's lives where pictures do in fact bleed, ghosts gibber and shriek, maidens run forever through mysterious landscapes from nameless foes; that place is, of course, the world of dreams and of the repressed guilts and fears that motivate them [i.e., the unconscious]. This world the dogmatic optimism and shallow psychology of the Age of Reason had denied; and yet this world it is the final, perhaps the essential, purpose of the gothic romance to assert.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Running, Dream, Men

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Sex, Thinking, Literature

  7 Copy quote

• Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine and they would say this doesn't suit our needs precisely but on the other hand you sound interesting. Would you be interested in doing a review?

  Leslie Fiedler

  Hands, Interesting, Sound

  4 Copy quote

• All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Art, Criticism, Way

  7 Copy quote

• Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Light, August, Rooms

  7 Copy quote

• The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Historical, Criticism, Important

  16 Copy quote

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

  Leslie Fiedler

  Telling The Truth, Assignments

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Teacher, Students, Wanted

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Gray Area, Novel

  60 Copy quote

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

  Leslie Fiedler

  Black, Changed, Situation

  7 Copy quote

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

  Leslie Fiedler

  Reading, Reason, Talk To Me

  6 Copy quote

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

  Leslie Fiedler

  One Thing, Ifs, I Can

  4 Copy quote

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

  Leslie Fiedler

  Camille, Heard

  7 Copy quote

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

  Leslie Fiedler

  Tolerance, Analysis, Lows

  "Leslie Fiedler Dies at 85; Provocative Literary Critic" by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, www.nytimes.com. January 31, 2003.

  9 Copy quote

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

  Leslie Fiedler

  Kings, People, Remember

  7 Copy quote

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

  Leslie Fiedler

  Funny, Thinking, Patterns

  52 Copy quote

• It's funny to be a critic.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Funny, Critics

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Moving, Years, Space

  4 Copy quote

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

  Leslie Fiedler

  Advice, My Friends

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Thinking, Dying

  4 Copy quote

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

  Leslie Fiedler

  Comic, Stills

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Tough Times, Pay

  4 Copy quote

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