Leslie Fiedler Quotes
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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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Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.
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Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.
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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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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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I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.
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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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One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
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The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
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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 liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.
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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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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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My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.
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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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I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.
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It's funny to be a critic.
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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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Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.
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What I really dream of is that somebody would blow everything I've done out of the water in a beautiful way, which would clear the way for something better to come along.