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

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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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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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My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.
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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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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.
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The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.
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One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
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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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There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.
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It's funny to be a critic.
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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 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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Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
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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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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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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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