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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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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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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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Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.
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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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One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
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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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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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The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.
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The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
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It's funny to be a critic.
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Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
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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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Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
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My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.
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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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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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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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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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