Quote

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

Leslie Fiedler

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Leslie Fiedler
Age: 85 †
Born: 1917
Born: March 8
Died: 2003
Died: January 29
Journalist
Literary Critic
University Teacher
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Leslie Aaron Fiedler
Leslie A. Fiedler
Criticism
Read
History
Science
Art
Way
Good
Judged
Shouldn

More quotes by Leslie Fiedler

Image
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
Image
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
Image
It's funny to be a critic.
Leslie Fiedler
Image
When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.
Leslie Fiedler
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 really wanted to know.
Leslie Fiedler
Image
The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.
Leslie Fiedler
Image
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
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 did it better.
Leslie Fiedler
Image
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
Image
Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
Leslie Fiedler
Image
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
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 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
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
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 the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.
Leslie Fiedler
Image
DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.
Leslie Fiedler
Image
When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.
Leslie Fiedler
Image
One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
Leslie Fiedler
Image
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction.
Leslie Fiedler
Image
Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.
Leslie Fiedler
Image
Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
Leslie Fiedler