Leslie Fiedler Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.”
-- Leslie Fiedler -
“There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.”
-- Leslie Fiedler -
“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 -
“Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.”
-- Leslie Fiedler -
“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.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.”
-- Leslie Fiedler -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.”
-- Leslie Fiedler -
“All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.”
-- Leslie Fiedler -
“Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.”
-- 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 -
“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 think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Leslie Fiedler -
“Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.”
-- Leslie Fiedler -
“I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.”
-- 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 -
“If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction.”
-- Leslie Fiedler -
“My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.”
-- Leslie Fiedler -
“One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.”
-- Leslie Fiedler -
“Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.”
-- 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 -
“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
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