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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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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
American
French
Rather
Myth
History
English
America
Destiny
Insofar
Always
Americans
Inherit
Imagine
Inhabitants
Since
Unlike
Whatever
Precisely
More quotes by Leslie Fiedler
All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.
Leslie Fiedler
When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.
Leslie Fiedler
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
My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.
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.
Leslie Fiedler
Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
Leslie Fiedler
It's funny to be a critic.
Leslie Fiedler
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
DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.
Leslie Fiedler
One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
Leslie Fiedler
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
The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
Leslie Fiedler
The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.
Leslie Fiedler
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
Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
Leslie Fiedler
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
When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.
Leslie Fiedler
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
There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.
Leslie Fiedler
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
