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I Really Am A Pessimist. I've Always Felt That Fascism Is A More Natural Governmental Condition Than Democracy. Democracy Is A Grace. It's Something Essentially Splendid Because It's Not At All Routine Or Automatic. Fascism Goes Back To Our Infancy And Childhood, Where We Were Always Told How To Live. We Were Told, Yes, You May Do This; No, You May Not Do That. So The Secret Of Fascism Is That It Has This Appeal To People Whose Later Lives Are Not Satisfactory.

-Norman Mailer

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I Really Am A

Norman Mailer

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I Really Am A Pessimist. I've Always Felt That Fascism Is A More Natural Governmental Condition Than Democracy. Democracy Is A Grace. It's Something Essentially Splendid Because It's Not At All Routine Or Automatic. Fascism Goes Back To Our Infancy And Childhood, Where We Were Always Told How To Live. We Were Told, Yes, You May Do This; No, You May Not Do That. So The Secret Of Fascism Is That It Has This Appeal To People Whose Later Lives Are Not Satisfactory.

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In Such Places As Greenwich Village, A Menage-a-trois Was Completed- The Bohemian And The Juvenile Delinquent Came Face-to-face With The Negro, And The Hipster Was A Fact In American Life.

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...the Indispensable Requirement For A Good Newspaperman - As Eager To Tell A Lie As The Truth.

In Every Death Is A Celebration; In Every Ecstasy, One Little Death.

I've Always Felt That My Relationship To The United States Is Analogous To A Marriage. I Love This Country. I Hate It. I Get Angry At It. I Feel Close To It. I'm Charmed By It. I'm Repelled By It. And It's A Marriage That's Gone On For Let's Say At Least 50 Years Of My Writing Life, And In The Course Of That, What's Happened? It's Gotten Worse. It's Not What It Used To Be.

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The Desire For Success Lubricates Secret Prostitution In The Soul.

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The Way You Write Affects What You Say.

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.

The Sense Of A Long Last Night Over Civilization Is Back Again.

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When The Time Comes, They Won't Ask What Kind Of A Jew You Are.

People Who Are Greedy Have Extraordinary Capacities For Waste-they Must, They Take In Too Much.

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I Always Start A Book For Money. If You're Married Five Times You Have To.

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Simple Narcissism Gives The Power Of Beasts To Politicians, Professional Wrestlers And Female Movie Stars.

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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. 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?

Writing Can Wreck Your Body. You Sit There On The Chair Hour After Hour And Sweat Your Guts Out To Get A Few Words.

The Irish Are The Only Men Who Know How To Cry For The Dirty Polluted Blood Of All The World.

As Many People Die From An Excess Of Timidity As From Bravery.

The Highest Prize In A World Of Men Is The Most Beautiful Woman Available On Your Arm And Living There In Her Heart Loyal To You.

The Barry Goldwater Movement Excited The Depths Because The Apocalypse Was Brought More Near, And Like Millions Of Other Whites, I Had Been Leading A Life Which Was A Trifle Too Pointless And A Trifle Too Full Of Guilt And My Gullet Was Close To Nausea With The Empty Promises Of An Empty Liberal Center.

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Movies Are More Likely Than Literature To Reach Deep Feelings In People.

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So You Come Soon To Power, But You Have Merely Inherited The Crisis And Yours Is The Profit Of Cancer.

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People Who Live Under Fascism Are Not Only Miserable But They're Full Of Shame. You Just Don't Go In And Inject Democracy Into Them. They're Half Crazy With Their Own.

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I've Made An Ass Of Myself So Many Times I Often Wonder If I Am One.

We're All Divided Souls, We've Got Two Natures In Us, You Measure Schizophrenia Not By The Fact That You're Divided But How Well The Divisions Speak To One Another.

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What's The Use Of Being A Writer If You Can't Irritate A Great Many People?

God Is A Creator, Not A Law Giver.

No Physical Activity Is So Vain As Boxing. A Man Gets Into The Ring To Attract Admiration. In No Sport, Therefore, Can You Be More Humiliated.

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Television Is Coitus Interruptus Brought Into Aesthetics.

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I Really Gave Up Being Passionate About Politics 10, 15, 20 Years Ago, Because I Think Finally That There Were Forces In The Country That Are Larger Than Politics Itself. And So I Find It A Fascinating Game, This Wonderful Stuff Goes On In Terms Of Watching The Game. But If You Get To Down It, Look, I`m Going To Root For Someone, I`ll Root At A Football Game, Not For Politicians.

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When I Read It ["tough Guys Don't Dance"], I Don't Wince, Which Is All I Ever Ask For A Book I Write.

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America Has An Almost Obscene Infatuation With Itself. Has There Ever Been A Big, Powerful Country That Is As Patriotic As America? And Patriotic In The Tinniest Way, With So Much Flag Waving? You'd Really Think We Were Some Poor Little Republic, And That If One Person Lost His Religion For One Hour, The Whole Thing Would Crumble. America Is The Real Religion In This Country.

Murder Offers The Promise Of Vast Relief. It Is Never Unsexual.

Culture's Worth Huge, Huge Risks. Without Culture We're All Totalitarian Beasts.

I Respect Most Boxers Because They're Violent People Who Learned To Discipline Themselves ... A Good Boxer Is An Artist ... Boxing Is Existential - Some Fights Are Better Than Others.

The Greater The Power Of Any Subjective State, The More Total Is A Romantic's Assumption That Everyone Understands Exactly What He Is About To Do, Therefore Waste Not A Moment By Stopping To Tell Them.

A Book Of Great Beauty And Manically Exquisite Insight With A Wild And Deadly Humor . . . The Only American Novelist Who May Conceivably Be Possessed By Genius.

There's A Subterranean Impetus Towards Pornography So Powerful That Half The Business World Is Juiced By The Sort Of Half Sex That One Finds In Advertisements.

Writing For A Newspaper Is Like Running A Revolutionary War. You Go To Battle Not When You Are Ready, But When Action Offers Itself.

What Characterizes A Member Of A Minority Group Is That He Is Forced To See Himself As Both Exceptional And Insignificant, Marvelous And Awful, Good And Evil.

When A Novel Comes, It's A Grace. Something In The Cosmos Has Forgiven You Long Enough So That You Can Start.

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Mailer's Law: A Thing Either Gets Better Or It Costs More To Run It The Way It Was.

If You Can Change Style, Why Stick To One Style? Style Is A Vanity Because It Gives You Product Identification.

We Love Those Who Can Lead Us To A Place We Will Never Reach Without Them.

Cute Friendship

To Know What You Want To Say Is Not The Best Condition For Writing A Novel. Novels Go Happiest When You Discover Something You Did Not Know You Knew: An Insight Into One Of Your Opaque Characters, A Metaphor That Startles You... A Truth... That Used To Elude You.

I Have Always Had This Very Strong, Call It A Feeling, Call It A Prejudice, Call It A Conviction ... That The Mysteries Are Not Easily Available. You Have To Earn Entrance Into Them. You Didn't Learn Things For Too Little. You Had To Pay A Price. And I Felt That Lsd Was Just Blasting Superhighways Into The Mysteries. And What I Really Didn't Like About Lsd Is That People Who Were Taking It Were Seeming To Become Less And Less As They Took It. They Got Emptier And More Vapid.

I Don't Read Other Writers Because I'm Writing All The Time. It's Too Disturbing To Read A Writer With A Good Style When You're In The Middle Of Putting Your Work Together.

Working Together

You're Gambling With Something Vital. Most Writers Get Smashed Egos.

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.

The Sole Virtue Of Losing Your Short-term Memory Is That It Does Free You To Be Your Own Editor.

When You Know Too Much Information And You Acquire It Too Easily, You Tend To Either Use It In Disagreeable Ways, Out Of Vanity, Or You Tend To Be Indiscriminate About It. I Mean, In The Old Days, It Was Tricky, You Had To Go To Various Encyclopedias, You Had To Go To The Library, Maybe Spend A Day There, Whatever. But In The End, If You Found Something, It Was Really Exciting. Now You Hit A Couple Of Buttons And You Get Some Information. Which, By The Way, Is Almost Always Presented In That Same Goddamn Mediocre Style That Characterizes The Internet For Me. It Is Slightly Deadening.

One Of The Reasons The English Got Through All Their Falls And The Loss Of Their Empire, All Their Disasters, Their Strikes, Their Difficulties, Their Wars Through The Years Was They Had Shakespeare To Fall Back On. And They Speak Well In England.

Growth, In Some Curious Way, I Suspect, Depends On Being Always In Motion Just A Little Bit, One Way Or Another.

I'm Hostile To Men, I'm Hostile To Women, I'm Hostile To Cats, To Poor Cockroaches, I'm Afraid Of Horses.

One Will Feel The Same Subtle Nausea Coming Into The City Or Waiting To Depart From It That One Feels Now In Such Plastic Catacombs As O'hare's Reception Center In Chicago.

I Think The Internet Is The Greatest Waste Of Time Since Masturbation Was Discovered.

The Difference Between Writing A Book And Being On Television Is The Difference Between Conceiving A Child And Having A Baby Made In A Test Tube.

Chicago Is The Great American City, New York Is One Of The Capitals Of The World, And Los Angeles Is A Constellation Of Plastic; San Francisco Is A Lady

The White Protestant's Ultimate Sympathy Must Be With Science, Factology, And Committee Rather Than With Sex, Birth, Heat, Flesh, Creation, The Sweet And The Funky; They Must Vote, Manipulate, Control, And Direct, These Protestants Who Are The Center Of Power In Our Land, They Must Go For What They Believe Is Reason When It Is Only The Square Logic Of The Past.

Everything Wrong With America Led To The Point Where The Country Built That Tower Of Babel, Which Consequently Had To Be Destroyed. And Then Came The Next Shock. We Had To Realize That The People That Did This Were Brilliant. It Showed That The Ego We Could Hold Up Until September 10 Was Inadequate.

There Was That Law Of Life, So Cruel And So Just, That One Must Grow Or Else Pay More For Remaining The Same.

To Be Married To A Good Woman Is To Live With Tender Surprise.

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