All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science. — Leslie Fiedler Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis. — Leslie Fiedler Copy Share Image
“Our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and a woman, which we expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery,… — Leslie Fiedler Copy Share
The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along. — Leslie Fiedler Copy Share Image
I love it now that a large minority of people who are handicapped prefer to call themselves crippled. This is all part of the… — Leslie Fiedler Copy Share Image
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… — Leslie Fiedler Copy Share Image
When I was 12 years old, someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing… — Leslie Fiedler Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Faulkner turned out to be a great teacher. When a student asked a question ineptly, he answered the question with what the student had… — Leslie Fiedler Copy Share Image
DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath. — Leslie Fiedler Copy Share Image
Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect… — Leslie Fiedler Copy Share Image
