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

Leslie Fiedler

I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.

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

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

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

Leslie Fiedler

It's funny to be a critic.

Leslie Fiedler

It's so wrong when I pick up a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and I look at the last page and it doesn't say, Yours truly, at the end.

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

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

Leslie Fiedler

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

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

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

Leslie Fiedler

Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.

Leslie Fiedler

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

Leslie Fiedler

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

Leslie Fiedler

The middlebrow, I hate.

Leslie Fiedler

The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.

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

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

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

Leslie Fiedler