Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailerwas an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker, actor, and political activist. His novel The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948. His best-known work was widely considered to be The Executioner's Song, which was published in 1979, and for which he won one of his two Pulitzer Prizes. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, his book Armies of the Night was awarded the National Book Award...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth31 January 1923
CityLong Branch, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
When you know too much information and you acquire it too easily, you tend to either use it in disagreeable ways, out of vanity, or you tend to be indiscriminate about it. I mean, in the old days, it was tricky, you had to go to various encyclopedias, you had to go to the library, maybe spend a day there, whatever. But in the end, if you found something, it was really exciting. Now you hit a couple of buttons and you get some information. Which, by the way, is almost always presented in that same goddamn mediocre style that characterizes the Internet for me. It is slightly deadening.
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.
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.
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.
On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
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.
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.
Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.
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.
In every death is a celebration; in every ecstasy, one little death.
Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
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.
The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?