Norman Mailer
Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.Collection: Girl
To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder... The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.Collection: Army
When the wind carries a cry which is meaningful to human ears, it is simpler to believe the wind shares with us some part of the emotion of Being than that the mysteries of a hurricane's rising murmur reduce to no more than the random collision of insensate molecules.Collection: Meaningful
I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946... We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.Collection: Girl
Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way. p.207Collection: Real
There`s a tendency for Americans, particularly the simpler you are, the more you believe in the president as the kind of person to be.Collection: Believe
Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.Collection: Unions
I don't read other writers because I'm writing all the time. It's too disturbing to read a writer with a good style when you're in the middle of putting your work together.Collection: Writing
The great power in America is the corporations - we`re a corporate country. We`re run by a CEO and the stockholders have very little to say on how the corporation is run. Fine, the board of directors run it and the stockholders can just be disgruntled, but who gives a damn?Collection: Running
Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.Collection: People
It all comes down to who does the dishes.Collection: Relationship
Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.Collection: Courage
Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: New York
In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.Collection: Hipster
There are days when I'll wake up and think, oh, I've really been something. You know, it won't be the same without me. And then there are days when I wake up and I say, 'Don't kid yourself. Your contribution was minimal. You changed very little. Everything you hated prospered'.Collection: Life
Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.Collection: Blood
Armstrong, sitting in the commander's seat, spacesuit on, helmet on, plugged into electrical and environmental umbilical's, is a man who is not only a machine himself in the links of these networks, but is also a man sitting in (what Collins is later to call) a 'mini-cathedral.' a man somewhat more than a pilot, somewhat more than a superpilot, is in fact a veritable high priest of the forces of society and scientific history concentrated in that mini cathedral, a general of the church of the forces of technology.Collection: Technology
Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought.Collection: Horror
Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.Collection: Television
You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.Collection: Believe
I take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I've learned to alternate the two as matters develop.Collection: Writing
I can`t get excited about politics, but I love it as a game. Because what I love in politics - this is very selfish of me, but who cares - what I do love in politics is this ability it has to make you think in new ways.Collection: Selfish
We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.Collection: War
The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.Collection: Design
If you can change style, why stick to one style? Style is a vanity because it gives you product identification.Collection: Vanity
So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.Collection: Voice
Part of living, part of becoming a wise man or a wise woman, is to get to that point where you can have a friend for whom you are genuinely happy when he or she has a success. That's tough. Very few people get to that point. With writers it's next to impossible. You can't really bless a writer who's as good as yourself.Collection: Wise
While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.Collection: New York
You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that's the highest effectiveness man has achieved.Collection: Men
For 40 years we were led to think of the Russians as godless, materialistic and an evil empire. When the Cold War ended, we suddenly discovered that Russia was a poor Third World country. They had not been equipped to take over the world. In fact, they were just trying to improve a miserable standard of oppressive living, and couldn't. They had to spend too much on arms build-up. We didn't win the Cold War; we bankrupted the Russians. In effect, it was a big bank exhausting the reserves of a smaller one.Collection: Country
I don't hate women, but I think they should be kept in cages.Collection: Hate
One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness - the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.Collection: Weed
The paradox is that no love can prove so intense as the love of two narcissists for each other.Collection: Two
A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.Collection: Character
We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.Collection: Heart
The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.Collection: Passion
Growth is a greater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth.Collection: Successful
If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.Collection: Powerful
We are close to dead. There are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium; they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.Collection: Night
The true religion of America has always been America.Collection: America
I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.Collection: Believe
There are these two kinds of patriotism. There's blind patriotism, unflagging patriotism. And then there's the patriotism that says I live in a democracy and it's very important for the health and the life of this democracy that it get better all the time, not get worse.Collection: Two
I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.Collection: Children
There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.Collection: Angel
The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.Collection: Evil
Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizonCollection: Light