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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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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
Teacher
Question
Wanted
Faulkner
Great
Answered
Really
Student
Turned
Asked
Students

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When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.
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The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
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When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.
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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.
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The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.
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One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
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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.
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My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.
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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Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
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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.
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It's funny to be a critic.
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There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.
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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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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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Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
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
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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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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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I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.
Leslie Fiedler