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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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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
First
Liked
Much
Tough
Really
Pay
Way
Less
Time
Read
Pynchon
Didn
Denser
Firsts
Complexes
Book
Complex

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One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
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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.
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DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.
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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.
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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.
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The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.
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It's funny to be a critic.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
Leslie Fiedler
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Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
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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.
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