Norman Mailer

Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.

In the beginning, Mailer spins publicity for convict and murderer Jack Abbott, helps get Abbott's prison book published and Abbott paroled. The con with the prose style of a Doberman (all speed and teeth) obeys his muse again. Six weeks after parole, Abbott kills a man in New York City's East Village. ... It was common to hear New Yorkers say that he should be tried as an accessory to murder. Mailer barged around giving interviews and suing a newspaper for libel, looking truculent and stricken.
In one way it was unfair: Mailer had had the courage to sponsor a talented pariah, and then something in Abbott's transition from prison went disastrously wrong. Mailer was personally aggrieved and pained, not only for Abbott but for Abbott's victim. It is true that certain writers adopt convicts: criminals, sinister, romantic and stupid as sharks, become the executive arms of intellectuals' violent fantasies. For some reason, intellectuals rarely understand that they are being conned: convicts are geniuses of ingratiation. Still, Mailer after all was not promoting a killer but a prose stylist and what he judged to be a salvageable human being. He miscalculated: he overrated the writer in Abbott and underestimated the murderer.

That's a photograph of Norman Mailer. He was a very great writer; he, uh, donated his ego to the Harvard Medical School for study.

I am convinced the most unfortunate people are those who would make an art of love. It sours other effort. Of all artists, they are certainly the most wretched.

There was never a revolution to equal it, and never a city more glorious than Petrograd, and for all that period of my life I lived another and braved the ice of winter and the summer flies in Vyborg while across my adopted country of the past, winds of the revolution blew their flame, and all of us suffered hunger while we drank at the wine of equality.

I don't think we're ever going to have a cheap fascism of Brownshirts and goose stepping or anything of that sort. We're too American for that. We would find that ridiculous.
But there are always traces of repression. And you can find it in a Democratic government too. People who are "right-minded," you know, are always with us. But I think so long as we can move along with the economy, we're all right. It's just if there's a smash, a crash — that's when I'm not at all optimistic about what's going to happen.

You're a fool if you don't realize this is going to be the reactionary's century, perhaps their thousand-year reign. It's the one thing Hitler said which wasn't completely hysterical.

I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.

I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.

The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.

Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.

There is probably no sensitive heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

The novelist, thinks Sam, perspiring beneath blankets, must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all. The feminine in his nature cries out for proof he is a man; he loves himself and therefore despises all that he is.

I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.

Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.

I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life. ... Every time I get totally discouraged with this country, I remind myself, "No, the fact is that finally we can really say what we think, and some extraordinary things have come out of that."