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

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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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Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
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It's funny to be a critic.
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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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One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
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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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DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.
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When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.
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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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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 doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
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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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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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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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I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.
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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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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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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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