Quotes About Norman Mailer

A]s Norman Mailer pointed out decades ago, and Philip Roth not long afterwards, niceness is the enemy. Every soft stroke from society is like the pfft of an aerosol can as it eats up a few more atoms of our brain's delicate ozone, and furthers our personal cretinization.

How could you not love Norman Mailer? He was a total chauvinist, but also so vulnerable.

MADONNA WASN'T GOING to give it up to a regular reporter. We thought first of asking Norman Mailer to do the piece, but in retrospect that could have been an ego train wreck. She agreed to Carrie Fisher. (Carrie said she was our "lower-budget alternative.")

When interviewing for a job, tell the editor how you love to report. How your passion is gathering information. Do not mention how you want to be a writer, use the word 'prose,' or that deep down you have a sinking suspicion you are the next Norman Mailer.

Norman Mailer enhances the beauty of pugilism by elegantly exploring it.

I fell in love with Norman Mailer's 'Of a Fire on the Moon', a description of the 1969 moon landing and the society that had produced NASA - and was inspired by him to begin a kind of anthropology of modern life.

What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.'

I loved Woody Allen's short pieces. I was equally influenced by Woody Allen and Norman Mailer. I was very into this idea of being high-low, of being serious and intellectual but also making really broad jokes.

who seemed to have grown his afro to new and previously unexplored heights, inspiring Norman Mailer to write that King looked like a man falling down an elevator shaft, "whoosh went the hair up from his head

I am convinced the most unfortunate people are those who would make an art of love. It sours other effort. Of all artists, they are certainly the most wretched.

The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.

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.

I've always been a fan of books that create an interesting blend of fact and fiction - whether it's Norman Mailer, or 'The Short Timers,' or 'In Cold Blood.' I'm a fan of that genre.

Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.

The jeep would round the bend, be hit by a dozen bullets at once, and that would be the end of his petty history of unfocused groping and unimportant dissatisfactions.

The book was sloppily written in many parts (the words came too quickly and too easily) and there was hardly a noun in any sentence that was not holding hands with the nearest and most commonly available adjective — scalding coffee and tremulous fear are the sorts of thing you will find throughout. Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing.

Mediocrities flock to any movement which will indulge their self-pity and their self-righteousness, for without a Movement the mediocrity is on the slide into terminal melancholia.

Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get.

Maybe it's not what we learn that's crucial, but the questions we're left with. Will we always be a manic-depressive nation of the greatest and most vile achievements? Will we always be a nation of both astronauts and mass-murderers?

He was ready to argue there was no rational way you could justify the death penalty, except to admit it was absolute revenge. If that, he would say, was the foundation of the criminal justice system, then we had a pretty sick system.

Even now she was very patriotic, and like most patriots she felt strongly and thought weakly, and so it was not easy to argue with her.

It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist—the hipster.

Saddam, for all his crimes, did not have a hand in September 11, but President Bush is a philosopher. September 11 was evil, Saddam is evil, all evil is connected. Ergo, Iraq.

Back when I could get away with it, I subscribed to Norman Mailer's view that exercise without excitement, without competition or danger or purpose, didn't strengthen the body but simply wore it out. Swimming laps always seemed to me especially pointless. But I can't get away with that attitude now. If I don't swim, I will be a pear-shaped pillar of suet.