Norman Mailer citáty
Norman Mailer
Datum narození: 31. leden 1923
Datum úmrtí: 10. listopad 2007
Norman Kingsley Mailer [mejlr] byl americký spisovatel, svými reportážemi a reportážními romány se zařadil k tzv. novému žurnalismu.
Citáty Norman Mailer
„…. Sovětský svaz musí být pravděpodobně nejnudnější země v dějinách národů.“
Originál: (en) …the Soviet Union must probably be the most boring country in the history of the nations.
Zdroj: [Marcuse, Herbert, Kellner, Douglas, 2005, The New Left and the 1960s, Routledge, 94, angličtina]
„Zřejmě jediný americký prozaik, jehož lze považovat za génia.“
o Williamu Sewardu Burroughsovi
Zdroj: [Olehla, Richard, Burroughs, William Seward, iliteratura.cz, 2003-05-26, 2011-02-15, http://www.iliteratura.cz/Clanek/12687/burroughs-william-seward]
„I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.“
Interview with Divina Infusino in American Way (15 June 1995)
„Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.“
"Mr. Mailer Interviews Himself" in The New York Times Book Review (17 September 1965)
„Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.“
— Norman Mailer, kniha The Presidential Papers
Preface
The Presidential Papers (1963)
Kontext: Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.
„We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time.“
— Norman Mailer, kniha Ancient Evenings
Ancient Evenings (1983) Last lines
Kontext: 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.
„We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art.“
Introducing our Argument
Cannibals and Christians (1966)
Kontext: We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd … Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste…? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?
„I had a great many prejudices that have since dissolved.“
TIME interview (1991)
Kontext: I had a great many prejudices that have since dissolved. But what I still hate about the women's movement is their insistence upon male piety in relation to it. I don't like bending my knee and saying I'm sorry, mea culpa. I find now that women have achieved some power and recognition they are quite the equal of men in every stupidity and vice and misjudgment that we've exercised through history.
They're narrow-minded, power seeking, incapable of recognizing the joys of a good discussion. The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
What I've come to discover are the negative sides, that women are no better than men. I used to think — this is sexism in a way, I'll grant it — that women were better than men. Now I realize no, they're not any better.
„The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.“
TIME interview (1991)
Kontext: It's a misperception of me that I am a wild man — I wish I still were. I'm 68 years old. The rage now is, oh, so deep it's almost comfortable. It has even approached the point where I can live with it philosophically. The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.
„America is a nation of experts without roots; we are always creating tacticians who are blind to strategy and strategists who cannot take a step“
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
Kontext: America is a nation of experts without roots; we are always creating tacticians who are blind to strategy and strategists who cannot take a step, and when the culture has finished its work the institutions handcuff the infirmity.
„The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.“
Introducing our Argument
Cannibals and Christians (1966)
Kontext: 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.
„You're a fool if you don't realize this is going to be the reactionary's century, perhaps their thousand-year reign.“
— Norman Mailer, kniha The Naked and the Dead
Gen. Edward Cummings, in Pt. 1, Ch. 3
The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Kontext: You're a fool if you don't realize this is going to be the reactionary's century, perhaps their thousand-year reign. It's the one thing Hitler said which wasn't completely hysterical.
„One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one.“
Interview in Writers at Work Third Series (1967) edited by George Plimpton
Kontext: 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.
„There's a detachment that you need as a writer. And as a young man, I probably had more detachment than I have today.“
Interview for French TV (1998)
Kontext: 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."
„Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state.“
— Norman Mailer, kniha Ancient Evenings
Ancient Evenings (1983) First lines
Kontext: Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
„The concept of hero is antagonistic to impersonal social progress,“
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
Kontext: The concept of hero is antagonistic to impersonal social progress, to the belief that social ills can be solved by social legislating, for it sees a country as all-but-trapped in its character until it has a hero who reveals the character of the country to itself.
„America was the land where people still believed in heroes.“
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
Kontext: America was the country in which the dynamic myth of the Renaissance — that every man was potentially extraordinary — knew its most passionate persistence. Simply, America was the land where people still believed in heroes.
