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.
Podobní autoři
Anton Myrer9
americký autor
Sherwood Anderson1
spisovatel
Edward Dahlberg1
romanopisec, esejista
Paul Theroux2
americký autor cestopisů a romanopisecDaniel Keyes5
americký autorCharles Glass1
americký novinář
William Goldman3
americký spisovatel, scenárista a dramatik
Citáty Norman Mailer
„Zřejmě jediný americký prozaik, jehož lze považovat za génia.“
— Norman Mailer
o Williamu Sewardu Burroughsovi
„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.“
— Norman Mailer
Interview with Divina Infusino in American Way (15 June 1995)
„Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.“
— Norman Mailer
"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
Context: 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.
Preface
„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.“
— Norman Mailer
Context: 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.
Ch. 1
„Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state.“
— Norman Mailer
Context: 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.
Ancient Evenings (1983) First lines
„One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one.“
— Norman Mailer
Context: 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.
Interview in Writers at Work Third Series (1967) edited by George Plimpton
„I love the idea of a left conservative because it gets rid of political cant. We're stifling in it.“
— Norman Mailer
Context: I love the idea of a left conservative because it gets rid of political cant. We're stifling in it. One of the diseases of the right is self-righteousness. I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
One of the diseases of the left is political correctness. If you're out of power for too long, then you just get worse and worse about how important your own ideas are.
„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
Context: 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.
Gen. Edward Cummings, in Pt. 1, Ch. 3
„Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful“
— Norman Mailer
Context: For that is the genius of the old man — Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful … That fine edge in Tolstoy, the knowledge that compassion is valueless without severity (for otherwise it cannot defend itself against sentimentality), gave The Naked and the Dead whatever enduring virtue it may possess and catapulted the amateur who wrote it into the grim ranks of those successful literary men and women who are obliged to become professional in order to survive …
Mailer's Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition (1998)
„The concept of hero is antagonistic to impersonal social progress,“
— Norman Mailer
Context: 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.
„I don't think we're ever going to have a cheap fascism of Brownshirts and goose stepping or anything of that sort.“
— Norman Mailer
Context: I don't think we're ever going to have a cheap fascism of Brownshirts and goose stepping or anything of that sort. We're too American for that. We would find that ridiculous.
But there are always traces of repression. And you can find it in a Democratic government too. People who are "right-minded," you know, are always with us. But I think so long as we can move along with the economy, we're all right. It's just if there's a smash, a crash — that's when I'm not at all optimistic about what's going to happen.
