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.
There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
There is no question that Hogg by Samuel R. Delany is a work of literary merit.
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
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.
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
There's a detachment that you need as a writer. And as a young man, I probably had more detachment than I have today. So that part of me was just looking at the battlefield, and it was certainly full of horrors. There was a lieutenant with us and a driver and another enlisted man like myself. And I think they were shocked profoundly.'
I just thought — this is a cold and cruel thing to say, but it's the way a writer is — I thought, "Oh, this is good." Not that it was good that all these people are dead. But "Oh, it's so good for writing." There was a sense of, "This can be used."
There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.
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.
Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.
Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.