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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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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
Pushed
Direction
Somebody
Stand
Thing
Something

More quotes by 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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One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
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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Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
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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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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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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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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When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.
Leslie Fiedler
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Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.
Leslie Fiedler