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.
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Citáty Norman Mailer
„…. Sovětský svaz musí být pravděpodobně nejnudnější země v dějinách národů.“
— Norman Mailer
(en) …the Soviet Union must probably be the most boring country in the history of the nations.
Source: [Marcuse, Herbert, Kellner, Douglas, 2005, The New Left and the 1960s, Routledge, 94, angličtina]
„Zřejmě jediný americký prozaik, jehož lze považovat za génia.“
— Norman Mailer
o Williamu Sewardu Burroughsovi
Source: [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.“
— 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
The Presidential Papers (1963), 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
„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
„The concept of hero is antagonistic to impersonal social progress,“
— Norman Mailer
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960), 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.
„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
TIME interview (1991), 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.
„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
TIME interview (1991), 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.
„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
The Naked and the Dead (1948), 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
„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
The Man Who Studied Yoga (1956), 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
„To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder…“
— Norman Mailer
The Naked and the Dead (1948), Context: 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.
Gen. Edward Cummings, in Pt. 1, Ch. 6
