Norman Mailer (1923 – 2007)
American novelist, journalist, playwright, screenwriter and film director who is considered to have been innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism.
I've always felt that my relationship to the United States is analogous to a marriage. I love this country. I hate it. I get angry at it. I feel close to it. I'm charmed by it. I'm repelled by it. And it's a marriage that's gone on for let's say at least 50 years of my writing life, and in the course of that, what's happened? It's gotten worse. It's not what it used to be.
Witches have no wit, said the magician who was weak. Hula, hula, said the witches.
When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
His consolation in those hours when he was most uncharitable to himself is that taken at his very worst he was at least still worthy of being a character in a novel by Balzac, win one day, lose the next, and do it with boom! and baroque in the style.
Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is the growth of madness denied.
A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, compromised idealism, career-advancement, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat.
I love the idea of a left conservative because it gets rid of political cant. We're stifling in it. One of the diseases of the right is self-righteousness. I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
One of the diseases of the left is political correctness. If you're out of power for too long, then you just get worse and worse about how important your own ideas are.
What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer — war, and the preparations for new war.
Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
He was a very sweet-natured person, despite what some people think. And he was very very patient. I would take one of his manuscripts and make some suggestions and he would be very nice about it and say, 'Yes, you've given me something to think about.' And I would get the manuscript back and I would see that he had included none of my ideas
The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity — it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.
Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be."... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.
He was interesting, because he was interested. ... I went to Provincetown a year or two ago and stayed with him and Norris. It was very pleasant. He was in good form. We both dislike the same things about our native land so we had lots to talk about.
Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.
He felt a crude ecstasy. He could not have given the reason, but the mountain tormented him, beckoned him, held an answer to something he wanted. It was so pure, so austere.