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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
Always
Americans
Inherit
Imagine
Inhabitants
Since
Unlike
Whatever
Precisely
American
French
Rather
Myth
History
English
America
Destiny
Insofar

More quotes by Leslie Fiedler

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Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
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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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Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.
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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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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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When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.
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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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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Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
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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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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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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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.
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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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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The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
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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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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It's funny to be a critic.
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