Norman Mailer
People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.Collection: Military
...never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile.Collection: Rejection
I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.Collection: Dog
Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.Collection: Anxiety
Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit.Collection: Summer
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.Collection: Horse
...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.Collection: Lying
Amateurs... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.Collection: Writing
MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience.Collection: Honesty
People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.Collection: People
The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again; it has perhaps not been here so intensely in thirty years, not since the Nazis were prospering, but it is coming back.Collection: Night
I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.Collection: Artist
When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.Collection: Long
The Barry Goldwater movement excited the depths because the apocalypse was brought more near, and like millions of other whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too pointless and a trifle too full of guilt and my gullet was close to nausea with the empty promises of an empty liberal center.Collection: Promise
The novelist ... 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.Collection: Believe
We didn't win the Cold War, we were just a big bank that bankrupted a smaller bank because we had an arms race that wiped the Russians out.Collection: War
In my day the library was a wonderful place.... We didn't have visual aids and didn't have various programs...it was a sanctuary.... So I tend to think the library should remain a center of knowledge.Collection: Thinking
What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it.Collection: Athlete
A high church for the true mediocre.Collection: Church
I would introduce myself if it were not useless. The name I had last night will not be the same as the name I have tonight. For the moment, then, let me say that I am thinking of Sam Slovoda.Collection: Night
What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?Collection: Opposites
You do not really wish to hear more of the Battle of Kadesh. Let me say only that human fat, gorged in considerable quantity, has an intoxicating effect. I became ... drunk.Collection: Drunk
Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to function long enough to give an opportunity to discover where the failure occurred. Most early debacles were so benighted that rocket engineers could have been forgiven for daubing the blood of a virgin goat on the orifice of the firing chamber.Collection: Opportunity
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.Collection: Love
I did like Robert Vavra's book not only for its so very good photographs but for the text as well. He's no ordinary fellow, obviously.Collection: Book
Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.Collection: Los Angeles
Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.Collection: Stories
Since great writers communicate a vision of existence, one can't borrow their methods. The method is married to the vision.Collection: Writing
Goldstein, you'd be a pretty good boy if you wasn't so chicken.Collection: Boys
I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes. If you're half evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person you are opposed to is totally evil.Collection: Humility
If only gravity were working, the path would be symmetrical, it is the wind resistance that produces the tragic curve.Collection: Curves
A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.Collection: War
One will feel the same subtle nausea coming into the city or waiting to depart from it that one feels now in such plastic catacombs as O'Hare's reception center in Chicago.Collection: Cities
Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it.Collection: Country
The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.Collection: Night
There are two kinds of brave men: those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will.Collection: Men
There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.Collection: Freedom
The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic's assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.Collection: Stopping
The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten; the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.Collection: Wisdom
As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.Collection: Prayer
The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.Collection: Democracy
I don't want to retire. I'm not that good at crossword puzzlesCollection: Want
Insanity consists of building major structures upon foundations which do not exist.Collection: Insanity
I usually need a can of beer to prime me.Collection: Beer
You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.Collection: Conformity
Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.Collection: Children
I'm a great believer in the hereafter, in karma, in reincarnation. It does make sense. I believe that God is not just a law-giver, but a creative artist. The greatest of all. And what characterises artists is that they want to redo their work. Maybe it didn't come off perfectly, so they want to see it done again, and improved. Reincarnation is a way for God to improve his earlier works.Collection: Karma
Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It's an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.Collection: Writing
Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.Collection: Honesty