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"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."
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"Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away."
"A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat."
"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."
"Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me."
"Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens."
"In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you."
Explore more quotes by 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."
"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."
"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."
"If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction."
"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."
"There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola."
"What I really dream of is that somebody would blow everything I've done out of the water in a beautiful way, which would clear the way for something better to come along."
"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."
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