Leslie Fiedler Quotes
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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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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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DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.
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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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The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.
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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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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 have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.
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One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
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I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.
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There is a place in men's lives where pictures do in fact bleed, ghosts gibber and shriek, maidens run forever through mysterious landscapes from nameless foes; that place is, of course, the world of dreams and of the repressed guilts and fears that motivate them [i.e., the unconscious]. This world the dogmatic optimism and shallow psychology of the Age of Reason had denied; and yet this world it is the final, perhaps the essential, purpose of the gothic romance to assert.
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I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.
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Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.
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The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.
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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 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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Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.
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It's so wrong when I pick up a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and I look at the last page and it doesn't say, Yours truly, at the end.
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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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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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It's funny to be a critic.
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I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.
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I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.
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When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.
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My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.
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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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Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.
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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 somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.
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