About Leslie Fiedler: Leslie Aaron Fiedler is Love and Death in the American Novel (1960).
All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.
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.
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.
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.
DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.
Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.
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.
Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
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.
I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.
I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.
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.
I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction.
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.
Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
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.
One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.
The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.
