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

Leslie Fiedler

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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
History
Science
Art
Way
Good
Judged
Shouldn
Criticism
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More quotes by Leslie Fiedler

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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Leslie Fiedler
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Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
Leslie Fiedler
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When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.
Leslie Fiedler
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DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.
Leslie Fiedler
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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
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When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.
Leslie Fiedler
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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
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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
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Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.
Leslie Fiedler
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The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.
Leslie Fiedler
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The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
Leslie Fiedler
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If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction.
Leslie Fiedler
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One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
Leslie Fiedler
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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
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There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.
Leslie Fiedler
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My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.
Leslie Fiedler