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
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
There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola. – 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
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
All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn’t read it the way you read history or science. – 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 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 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 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
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
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
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
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
