68 Quotes by Leslie Fiedler

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.