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In My Day The Library Was A Wonderful Place.... We Didn't Have Visual Aids And Didn't Have Various Programs...it Was A Sanctuary.... So I Tend To Think The Library Should Remain A Center Of Knowledge.

-Norman Mailer

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In My Day The

Norman Mailer

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In My Day The Library Was A Wonderful Place.... We Didn't Have Visual Aids And Didn't Have Various Programs...it Was A Sanctuary.... So I Tend To Think The Library Should Remain A Center Of Knowledge.

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

The World's Not What I Want It To Be. But Then No One Ever Said I Had The Right To Design The World.

What Is There About Polarity That Is Matter Becoming More Complex?

To Blame The Poor For Subsisting On Welfare Has No Justice Unless We Are Also Willing To Judge Every Rich Member Of Society By How Productive He Or She Is. Taken Individual By Individual, It Is Likely That There's More Idleness And Abuse Of Government Favors Among The Economically Privileged Than Among The Ranks Of The Disadvantaged.

The Horror Of The Twentieth Century Was The Size Of Each New Event, And The Paucity Of Its Reverberation.

Existentialism Is The Kind Of Philosophy That Makes For Legendary Children.

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.

Indeed The Early History Of Rocket Design Could Be Read As The Simple Desire To Get The Rocket To Function Long Enough To Give An Opportunity To Discover Where The Failure Occurred. Most Early Debacles Were So Benighted That Rocket Engineers Could Have Been Forgiven For Daubing The Blood Of A Virgin Goat On The Orifice Of The Firing Chamber.

Somerset Maugham ... Wrote Somewhere That "nobody Is Any Better Than He Ought To Be."... I Carried It Along With Me As A Working Philosophy, But I Suppose That Finally I Would Have To Take Exception To The Thought ... Or Else The Universe Is Just An Elaborate Clock.

The Night Before I Left Las Vegas I Walked Out In The Desert To Look At The Moon. There Was A Jeweled City On The Horizon, Spires Rising In The Night, But The Jewels Were Diadems Of Electric And The Spires Were The Neon Of Signs Ten Stories High.

People Move Forward Into The Future Out Of The Way They Comprehend The Past. When We Don't Understand Something In Our Past, We Are Therefore Crippled.

You Don't Know A Woman Until You've Met Her In Court.

In My Day The Library Was A Wonderful Place.... We Didn't Have Visual Aids And Didn't Have Various Programs...it Was A Sanctuary.... So I Tend To Think The Library Should Remain A Center Of Knowledge.

It's Very Bad To Write A Novel By Act Of Will. I Can Do A Book Of Nonfiction Work That Way - Just Sign The Contract And Do The Book Because, Provided The Topic Has Some Meaning For Me, I Know I Can Do It. But A Novel Is Different. A Novel Is More Like Falling In Love. You Don't Say, 'i'm Going To Fall In Love Next Tuesday, I'm Going To Begin My Novel.' The Novel Has To Come To You. It Has To Feel Just Like Love.

Falling In Love

It's Not A Good Idea To Put Your Wife Into A Novel; Not Your Latest Wife Anyway.

There Are Two Kinds Of Brave Men: Those Who Are Brave By The Grace Of Nature, And Those Who Are Brave By An Act Of Will.

I Am Convinced The Most Unfortunate People Are Those Who Would Make An Art Of Love. It Sours Other Effort. Of All Artists, They Are Certainly The Most Wretched.

There Is No Greater Impotence In All The World Like Knowing You Are Right And That The Wave Of The World Is Wrong, Yet The Wave Crashes Upon You.

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

Cute Friendship

With The Pride Of The Artist, You Must Blow Against The Walls Of Every Power That Exists The Small Trumpet Of Your Defiance.

You Can Indulge Your Righteous Rage But The Things It Comes Out Of Are Pretty Cheap. The Trick Is To Make Yourself An Instrument Of Your Own Policy. Whether You Like It Or Not, That's The Highest Effectiveness Man Has Achieved.

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.

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.

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 Is Nothing Safe About Sex. There Never Will Be.

I Had The Idea That There Were Two Worlds. There Was A Real World As I Called It, A World Of Wars And Boxing Clubs And Children'shomes On Back Streets, And This Real World Was A World Where Orphans Burned Orphans.... I Liked The Other World In Which Almost Everyone Lived. The Imaginary World.

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.

Reagan Bankrupted The Soviet Union By Increasing Armaments.

You Have The Right To Speak Your Mind.

Speak Your Mind

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

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

Giving A Camera To Diane Arbus Is Like Putting A Live Grenade In The Hands Of A Child.

There Is A No Man's Land Between Sex And Love, And It Alters In The Night.

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

There Are Days When I'll Wake Up And Think, Oh, I've Really Been Something. You Know, It Won't Be The Same Without Me. And Then There Are Days When I Wake Up And I Say, 'don't Kid Yourself. Your Contribution Was Minimal. You Changed Very Little. Everything You Hated Prospered'.

The Art Of The Novel Is To Arrive At That Artless Point Where Your Characters Become More Real Than Yourself.

I Certainly Do Have This Feeling Of Affection For The Absolute Sense Of Intellectual Freedom That Exists As A Live Nerve, A Live Wire, Right Through The Center Of American Life.

I Take It For Granted That There's A Side Of Me That Loves Public Action, And There's Another Side Of Me That Really Wants To Be Alone And Work And Write. And I've Learned To Alternate The Two As Matters Develop.

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.

Did A Sense Of Shame Ever Reside In Our Republican Toadies? You Can't Stop People Who Are Never Embarrassed By Themselves. Will's Readiness To Turn A Sow's Ear Into A Silk Purse Can Be Cited As World Class Sycophancy.

Amateurs... Venture Into Scenes That A Writer With More Experience (and More Professional Concern) Would Bypass Or Eschew Altogether.

A Really Good Style Comes Only When A Man Has Become As Good As He Can Be. Style Is Character. A Good Style Cannot Come From A Bad Undisciplined Character.

It's Not The Sentiments Of Men Which Make History But Their Actions.

Over-certified Adjectives Are The Mark Of Most Best-seller Writing

The Private Terror Of The Liberal Spirit Is Invariably Suicide, Not Murder.

There Is Probably No Heterosexual Alive Who Is Not Preoccupied With His Latent Homosexuality.

Love Was Love, One Could Find It With Anyone, One Could Find It Anywhere. It Was Just That You Could Never Keep It. Not Unless You Were Ready To Die For It.

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.

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

I Don't Hate Women, But I Think They Should Be Kept In Cages.

Patterned After An Italian Renaissance Palace, It Is 88 Times As Large And One Millionth As Valuable To The Continuation Of Man. That Pentagon Of Traveling Salesmen.

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.

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.

In America All Too Few Blows Are Struck Into Flesh. We Kill The Spirit Here, We Are Experts At That. We Use Psychic Bullets And Kill Each Other Cell By Cell.

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

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.

What Were The Phenomena Of The World Today? If I Knew Little Else, I Knew The Answer - War, And The Preparations For New War.

Madness Is Locked Beneath. It Goes Into Tissues, Is Swallowed By The Cells. The Cells Go Mad. Cancer Is Their Flag. Cancer Is Thegrowth Of Madness Denied.

The Contradictory Remarks Of Politicians Are Forgotten; The More Asinine Predictions Of Pundits Are Buried With Mercy.

At Bottom, I Mean Profoundly At Bottom, The Fbi Has Nothing To Do With Communism, It Has Nothing To Do With Catching Criminals, It Has Nothing To Do With The Mafia, The Syndicate, It Has Nothing To Do With Trust-busting, It Has Nothing To Do With Interstate Commerce, It Has Nothing To Do With Anything But Serving As A Church For The Mediocre. A High Church For The True Mediocre.

Part Of The Oncoming Demise (of New York During Its Terrible Fiscal Crisis) Is That None Of Us Can Simply Believe It. We Were Always The Best And The Strongest Of Cities, And Our People Were Vital To The Teeth. Knock Them Down Eight Times And They Would Get Up With That Look In The Eye Which Suggests The Fight Has Barely Begun.

Great Hope Has No Real Footing Unless One Is Willing To Face Into The Doom That May Also Be On The Way. P.207

I'm A Great Believer In The Hereafter, In Karma, In Reincarnation. It Does Make Sense. I Believe That God Is Not Just A Law-giver, But A Creative Artist. The Greatest Of All. And What Characterises Artists Is That They Want To Redo Their Work. Maybe It Didn't Come Off Perfectly, So They Want To See It Done Again, And Improved. Reincarnation Is A Way For God To Improve His Earlier Works.

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

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

What's Not Realized About Good Novelists Is That They're As Competitive As Good Athletes. They Study Each Other - Where The Other Person Is Good And Where The Person Is Less Good. Writers Are Like That But Don't Admit It.

Short-term Amnesia Is Not The Worst Affliction If You Have An Irish Flair For The Sauce.

Boredom Slays More Of Existence Than War.

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

It All Comes Down To Who Does The Dishes.

For 40 Years We Were Led To Think Of The Russians As Godless, Materialistic And An Evil Empire. When The Cold War Ended, We Suddenly Discovered That Russia Was A Poor Third World Country. They Had Not Been Equipped To Take Over The World. In Fact, They Were Just Trying To Improve A Miserable Standard Of Oppressive Living, And Couldn't. They Had To Spend Too Much On Arms Build-up. We Didn't Win The Cold War; We Bankrupted The Russians. In Effect, It Was A Big Bank Exhausting The Reserves Of A Smaller One.

Alimony Is The Curse Of The Writing Class.

The Desire For Success Lubricates Secret Prostitution In The Soul.

When The Wind Carries A Cry Which Is Meaningful To Human Ears, It Is Simpler To Believe The Wind Shares With Us Some Part Of The Emotion Of Being Than That The Mysteries Of A Hurricane's Rising Murmur Reduce To No More Than The Random Collision Of Insensate Molecules.

I Am Not Here Only So That The Blind Might See, But To Teach Those Who Thought They Could See That They Are Blind

In America Few People Will Trust You Unless You Are Irreverent.

I Was Now At A University In New York, A Professor Of Existential Psychology With The Not Inconsiderable Thesis That Magic, Dread, And The Perception Of Death Were The Roots Of Motivation.

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.

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

Like All Men Who Are Napoleonic In Their Ambitionshe Has Instincts About The Nature Of Growth, A Lover's Sense Of The Momentof Crisis, And He Knewhow Costly Is Defeat When It Is Not Soothed By Greater Consciousness, And How Wasteful Is The Profit Of Victory When There Is Not The Courage To Employ It.

Conservatives Are People Who Look At A Tree And Feel Instinctively That It Is More Beautiful Than Anything They Can Name. But When It Comes To Defending That Tree Against A Highway, They Will Go For The Highway.

I Never Saw Love As Luck, As That Gift From The Gods Which Put Everything Else In Place, And Allowed You To Succeed. No, I Saw Love As Reward. One Could Find It Only After One's Virtue, Or One's Courage, Or Self-sacrifice, Or Generosity, Or Loss, Has Succeeded In Stirring The Power Of Creation.

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 Was Thinking That Surgeons Had To Be The Happiest People On Earth. To Cut People Up And Get Paid For It-that's Happiness, I Told Myself.

Even An Evil Man Can Have Principleshe Can Be True To His Own Evil, Which Is Not Always So Easy.

We Didn't Win The Cold War, We Were Just A Big Bank That Bankrupted A Smaller Bank Because We Had An Arms Race That Wiped The Russians Out.

Khomeini Has Offered Us The Opportunity To Regain Our Frail Religion ... Faith In The Power Of Words.

The Way You Write Affects What You Say.

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.

Part Of Living, Part Of Becoming A Wise Man Or A Wise Woman, Is To Get To That Point Where You Can Have A Friend For Whom You Are Genuinely Happy When He Or She Has A Success. That's Tough. Very Few People Get To That Point. With Writers It's Next To Impossible. You Can't Really Bless A Writer Who's As Good As Yourself.

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.

The Ultimate Tendency Of Liberalism Is Vegetarianism.

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.

Chicago Was A Town Where Nobody Could Forget How The Money Was Made. It Was Picked Up From Floors Still Slippery With Blood.

Hip Is The Sophistication Of The Wise Primitive In A Giant Jungle.

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

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

Masculinity Is Not Something Given To You, But Something You Gain. And You Gain It By Winning Small Battles With Honor.

Growth Is A Greater Mystery Than Death. All Of Us Can Understand Failure, We All Contain Failure And Death Within Us, But Not Even The Successful Man Can Begin To Describe The Impalpable Elations And Apprehensions Of Growth.

Goldstein, You'd Be A Pretty Good Boy If You Wasn't So Chicken.

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.

We Divorced Ourselves From The Materials Of The Earth, The Rock, The Wood, The Iron Ore; We Looked To New Materials Which Were Cooked In Vats, Long Complex Derivatives Of Urine Which We Called Plastic. They Had No Odor Of The Living, ... Their Touch Was Alien To Nature. ... [they Proliferated] Like The Matastases Of Cancer Cells.

And So I Ask, "would You Agree That Sex Is Where Philosophy Begins?" But God, Who Is The Oldest Of The Philosophers, Answers In His Weary Cryptic Way, "rather Think Of Sex As Time, And Time As The Connection Of New Circuits.

A Political Convention Is After All Not A Meeting Of A Corporation's Board Of Directors; It Is A Fiesta, A Carnival, A Pig-rooting, Horse-snorting, Band-playing, Voice-screaming Medieval Get-together Of Greed, Practical Lust, Compromised Idealism, Career-advancement, Meeting, Feud, Vendetta, Conciliation, Of Rabble-rousers, Fist Fights (as It Used To Be), Embraces, Drunks (again As It Used To Be) And Collective Rivers Of Animal Sweat.

The Final Purpose Of Art Is To Intensify, Even, If Necessary, To Exacerbate, The Moral Consciousness Of People.

A Nation Fights Well In Proportion To The Amount Of Men And Materials It Has. And The Other Equation Is That The Individual Soldier In That Army Is A More Effective Soldier The Poorer His Standard Of Living Has Been In The Past.

The Frenchman Jean-paulsartre ... Had A Dialectical Mind Good As A Machine For Cybernetics, Immense In Its Way, He Could Peel A Nuance Like An Onion, But He Had No Sense Of Evil, The Anguish Of God, And The Possible Existence Of Satan.

God Like Us Suffers The Ambition To Make A Destiny More Extraordinary Than Was Conceived For Him, Yes God Is Like Me, Only More So.

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.

I Don't Trust Compliments. I've Been Getting Them For Years. Sometimes I Deserve Them, Sometimes I Didn't. But Generally When People Give You Compliments There's One Of Two Things Wrong With Them. Either They're False, Or What's Worse Is They're Sincere. They Really Mean The Compliment. And Then They're Offering You Their Loyalty. And I'm Kind Of A Stingy... Well, I Don't Necessarily Want To Give All That Loyalty Back. So Either Way, Let's Skip The Compliments.

The Condition That Is Most Disagreeable In Your Life Becomes The Most Useful One. You Know, I Feel The Same Way About The U.s. Army. It Was Absolutely The Worst Experience Of My Life, And It Was Probably The Single Most Valuable Experience.

Love Asks Us That We Be A Little Braver Than Is Comfortable, A Little More Generous, A Little More Flexible. It Means Living On The Edge More Than We Care To.

Fascism Is More Of A Natural State Than Democracy. To Assume Blithely That We Can Export Democracy Into Any Country We Choose Can Serve Paradoxically To Encourage More Fascism At Home And Abroad. Democracy Is A State Of Grace That Is Attained Only By Those Countries Who Have A Host Of Individuals Not Only Ready To Enjoy Freedom But To Undergo The Heavy Labor Of Maintaining It.

One Thing I've Learned In All These Years Is Not To Make Love When You Really Don't Feel It; There's Probably Nothing Worse You Can Do To Yourself Than That.

There's That Popular Misconception Of Man As Something Between A Brute And An Angel. Actually Man Is In Transit Between Brute And God.

The Natural Role Of Twentieth-century Man Is Anxiety.

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

If God Is All Good, Then He Is Not All Powerful. If God Is All Powerful, Then He Is Not All Good. I Am A Disbeliever Is The Omnipotence Of God Because Of The Holocaust. But For 35 Years, I Have Been Believing That He Is Doing The Best He Can.

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.

Three Miles Long And Two Streets Wide, The Town Curls Around The Bay ... A Gaudy Run With Mediterranean Splashes Of Color, Crowded Steep-pitched Roofs, Fishing Piers And Fishing Boats Whose Stench Of Mackerel And Gasoline Is As Aphrodisiac To The Sensuous Nose As The Clean Bar-whisky Smell Of A Nightclub Where Call Girls Congregate.

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.

The Century Would Seek To Dominate Nature As It Had Never Been Dominated, Would Attack The Idea Of War, Poverty And Natural Catastrophe As Never Before. The Century Would Create Death, Devastation And Pollution As Never Before. Yet The Century Was Now Attached To The Idea That Man Must Take His Conception Of Life Out To The Stars.

Sentimentality Is The Emotional Promiscuity Of Those Who Have No Sentiment.

Tough Guys Don't Dance. You Had Better Believe It.

...never Have I Subscribed To The Doctrine Of Willful Rejection Of The World Or Its Visual Image. To The Non-objectivist This Act Of Impiety May Be Shockingly Impure, But God, I Have No Desire To Be Either Hollow Or Sterile.

The Writer Can Grow As A Person Or He Can Shrink. ... His Curiosity, His Reaction To Life Must Not Diminish. The Fatal Thing Is To Shrink, To Be Interested In Less, Sympathetic To Less, Desiccating To The Point Where Life Itself Loses Its Flavor, And One’s Passion For Human Understanding Changes To Weariness And Distaste.

On A Late-winter Evening In 1983, While Driving Through Fog Along The Maine Coast, Recollections Of Old Campfires Began To Drift Into The March Mist, And I Thought Of The Abnaki Indians Of The Algonquin Tribe Who Dwelt Near Bangor A Thousand Years Ago.

The Essence Of Spirit ... Was To Choose The Thing Which Did Not Better One's Position But Made It More Perilous. That Was Why The World He Knew Was Poor, For It Insisted Morality And Caution Were Identical.

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.

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.

Cancer Is The Growth Of Madness Denied.

The Sickness Of Our Times For Me Has Been Just This Damn Thing That Everything Has Been Getting Smaller And Smaller And Less And Less Important, That The Romantic Spirit Has Dried Up, That There Is No Shame Today. We're All Getting So Mean And Small And Petty And Ridiculous, And We All Live Under The Threat Of Extermination.

The Fact That We've Been A Great Democracy Doesn't Mean We Will Automatically Keep Being One If We Keep Waving The Flag.

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

You Can't Be A Serious Writer Of Fiction Unless You Believe The Story You Are Telling.

The Novelist ... Must Live In Paranoia And Seek To Be One With The World; He Must Be Terrified Of Experience And Hungry For It; He Must Think Himself Nothing And Believe He Is Superior To All.

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

Harsh Words Live In The Dungeon Of The Heart

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.

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

Every Time A Story About Me Appears In A Newspaper, I Am Injured Professionally.

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.

I Did Like Robert Vavra's Book Not Only For Its So Very Good Photographs But For The Text As Well. He's No Ordinary Fellow, Obviously.

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

There Is One Expanding Horror In American Life. It Is That Our Long Odyssey Toward Liberty, Democracy And Freedom-for-all May Be Achieved In Such A Way That Utopia Remains Forever Closed, And We Live In Freedom And Hell, Debased Of Style, Not Individual From One Another, Void Of Courage, Our Fear Rationalized Away.

We Are All So Guilty At The Way We Have Allowed The World Around Us To Become More Ugly And Tasteless Every Year That We Surrender To Terror And Steep Ourselves In It.

I Usually Need A Can Of Beer To Prime Me.

Love Is Simple To Understand If You Haven't Got A Mind Soft And Full Of Holes. It's A Crutch, That's All, And There Isn't Any One Of Us That Doesn't Need A Crutch.

Since Great Writers Communicate A Vision Of Existence, One Can't Borrow Their Methods. The Method Is Married To The Vision.

I Met Jack Kennedy In November, 1946... We Went Out On A Double Date And It Turned Out To Be A Fair Evening For Me. I Seduced A Girl Who Would Have Been Bored By A Diamond As Big As The Ritz.

Faction Is That Hybrid Of Documented Fact And Novelistic Elaboration.

A Democracy Depends Upon People Getting Brighter All The Time. Democracies Are Delicate. They're Not Just Ipso Facto And Just Go On And On.

I Guess All That's Left Is To Love The Fire.

Culture Is Worth A Little Risk.

There's Nothing Glorious About Being A Professional. . . . Professionalism Probably Comes Down To Being Able To Work On A Bad Day.

I Do Believe That America's Deepest Political Sickness Is That It Is A Self-righteous Nation.

Bright Was The Light Of My Last Martini On My Moral Horizon

Every One Of My Books Had Killed Me A Little More.

Prevarication, Like Honesty, Is Reflexive, And Soon Becomes A Sturdy Habit, As Reliable As Truth.

The Only Journey Of Knowledge Is From The Depth Of One Being To The Heart Of Another.

I Hate Everything Which Is Not In Myself.

The Function Of Socialism Is To Raise Suffering To A Higher Level.

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.

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.

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.

Only Another Writer Can Know How Much Damage Writing A Novel Can Do To You. It's An Unnatural Activity To Sit At A Desk And Squeeze Words Out Of Yourself.

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

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

Los Angeles Is A Constellation Of Plastic.

There`s A Tendency For Americans, Particularly The Simpler You Are, The More You Believe In The President As The Kind Of Person To Be.

I Can`t Get Excited About Politics, But I Love It As A Game. Because What I Love In Politics - This Is Very Selfish Of Me, But Who Cares - What I Do Love In Politics Is This Ability It Has To Make You Think In New Ways.

If Only Gravity Were Working, The Path Would Be Symmetrical, It Is The Wind Resistance That Produces The Tragic Curve.

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.

Comfortless Was My Religion, Anxiety Of The Anxieties, For I Believed God Was Not Love, But Courage. Love Came Only As A Reward.

Courage To Love

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

While I'm Working On A Book, I Rarely Read Anything More Than The New York Times. Which May Have The Long-term Effect Of Flattening My Style.

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

You Do Not Really Wish To Hear More Of The Battle Of Kadesh. Let Me Say Only That Human Fat, Gorged In Considerable Quantity, Has An Intoxicating Effect. I Became ... Drunk.

There Are Four Stages To Marriage. First There's The Affair, Then There's The Marriage, Then Children, And Finally The Fourth Stage, Without Which You Cannot Know A Woman, The Divorce.

Left-wingers Are Incapable Of Conspiring Because They Are All Egomaniacs.

We Have An Absolute Right In A Democracy To Argue About A War.

The Sense Of A Long Last Night Over Civilization Is Back Again; It Has Perhaps Not Been Here So Intensely In Thirty Years, Not Since The Nazis Were Prospering, But It Is Coming Back.

I Don't Trust A Man Who Uses The Word Evil Eighteen Times In Ten Minutes. If You're Half Evil, Nothing Soothes You More Than To Think The Person You Are Opposed To Is Totally Evil.

Television Is Coitus Interruptus Brought Into Aesthetics.

Along With All Else, Sandman Is A Comic Strip For Intellectuals, And I Say It's About Time.

So The Blind Will Lead The Blind, And The Deaf Shout Warnings To One Another Until Their Voices Are Lost.

Obsession Is The Single Most Wasteful Human Activity, Because With An Obsession You Keep Coming Back And Back And Back To The Same Question And Never Get An Answer.

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

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

We Think Of Marilyn Who Was Every Man's Love Affair With America. Marilyn Monroe Who Was Blonde And Beautiful And Had A Sweet Little Rinky-dink Of A Voice And All The Cleanliness Of All The Clean American Backyards.

Over The Years, I've Found One Rule. It Is The Only One I Give On Those Occasions When I Talk About Writing. A Simple Rule. If You Tell Yourself You Are Going To Be At Your Desk Tomorrow, You Are By That Declaration Asking Your Unconscious To Prepare The Material. You Are, In Effect, Contracting To Pick Up Such Valuables At A Given Time. Count On Me, You Are Saying To A Few Forces Below: I Will Be There To Write.

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

Decade After Decade, Artists Came To Paint The Light Of Provincetown, And Comparisons Were Made To The Lagoons Of Venice And The Marshes Of Holland, But Then The Summer Ended And Most Of The Painters Left, And The Long Dingy Undergarment Of The Gray New England Winter, Gray As The Spirit Of My Mood, Came Down To Visit.

Women Think Of Being A Man As A Gift. It Is A Duty. Even Making Love Can Be A Duty. A Man Has Always Got To Get It Up, And Love Isn't Always Enough.

Writing Books Is The Closest Men Ever Come To Childbearing.

Sex Is Not Only A Divine And Beautiful Activity; It's A Murderous Activity. People Kill Each Other In Bed. Some Of The Greatest Crimes Ever Committed Were Committed In Bed. And No Weapons Were Used.

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.

Horror Films Do Not Prepare Us For The Hours Lost In Searching After One Clear Thought.

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

As Kierkegaard Was The First To Suggest, We Can Never Know Where Our Prayers Are Likely To Go Nor From Whom The Answers Will Come. When We Think We Are Nearest To God, We Could Be Assisting The Devil.

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Anna Letitia Barbauld

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