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
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americký spisovatel, scenárista a dramatik
Ross Macdonald2
americký spisovatelCitáty 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
„The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.“
— Norman Mailer
Context: 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.
Introducing our Argument
„There's a detachment that you need as a writer. And as a young man, I probably had more detachment than I have today.“
— Norman Mailer
Context: 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."
„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)
„I give an idea to Sam. "Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered," I say to him.“
— Norman Mailer
Context: I give an idea to Sam. "Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered," I say to him.
"Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered," he repeats after me, and in desperation to seek his coma, mutters back, "I do not feel my nose, my nose is numb, my eyes are heavy, my eyes are heavy."
So Sam enters the universe of sleep, a man who seeks to live in such a way as to avoid pain, and succeeds merely in avoiding pleasure. What a dreary compromise is life!
Ch. 5
„We've got an agreeable, comfortable life here as Americans. But under it there's a huge, free-floating anxiety.“
— Norman Mailer
Context: We've got an agreeable, comfortable life here as Americans. But under it there's a huge, free-floating anxiety. Our inner lives, our inner landscape is just like that sky out there — it's full of smog. We really don't know what we believe anymore, we're nervous about everything.
„Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground;“
— Norman Mailer
Context: Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics which is concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull if not for the consequences of the actions of some of these men; and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.
„The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.“
— Norman Mailer
Context: 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“
— Norman Mailer
Context: 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.
