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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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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
James
Paper
Writer
Anything
Writing
Years
Cooper
Never
Signature
Men
Signatures

More quotes by Leslie Fiedler

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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
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Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
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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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.
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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When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.
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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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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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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Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
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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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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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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It's funny to be a critic.
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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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
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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