Background Image

...

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.

-Norman Mailer

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Somerset Maugham ... Wrote

Norman Mailer

...

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.

Views: 4

Topic

More From Norman Mailer

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

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.

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

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

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

Every Moment Of One's Existence One Is Growing Into More Or Retreating Into Less. One Is Always Living A Little More Or Dying A Little Bit.

Culture Is Worth A Little Risk.

The Great Power In America Is The Corporations - We`re A Corporate Country. We`re Run By A Ceo And The Stockholders Have Very Little To Say On How The Corporation Is Run. Fine, The Board Of Directors Run It And The Stockholders Can Just Be Disgruntled, But Who Gives A Damn?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Cancer Is The Growth Of Madness Denied.

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.

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'.

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

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.

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.

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

Somewhere, Something Incredible Happened In History - The Wrong Guys Won.

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

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.

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.

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

Writing Books Is The Closest Men Ever Come To Childbearing.

...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.

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.

Any War That Requires The Suspension Of Reason As A Necessity For Support Is A Bad War.

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.

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.

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.

It All Comes Down To Who Does The Dishes.

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.

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.

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

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

Reaching Consensus In A Group Is Often Confused With Finding The Right Answer.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

No Heart Is So Hard As The Timid Heart.

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.

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.

Armstrong, Sitting In The Commander's Seat, Spacesuit On, Helmet On, Plugged Into Electrical And Environmental Umbilical's, Is A Man Who Is Not Only A Machine Himself In The Links Of These Networks, But Is Also A Man Sitting In (what Collins Is Later To Call) A 'mini-cathedral.' A Man Somewhat More Than A Pilot, Somewhat More Than A Superpilot, Is In Fact A Veritable High Priest Of The Forces Of Society And Scientific History Concentrated In That Mini Cathedral, A General Of The Church Of The Forces Of Technology.

The Mark Of Mediocrity Is To Look For Precedent.

The Women's Movement Is Filled With Tyrants, Just As Men's Political Movements Are Equally Filled.

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.

A High Church For The True Mediocre.

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.

The Paradox Is That No Love Can Prove So Intense As The Love Of Two Narcissists For Each Other.

If A Person Is Not Talented Enough To Be A Novelist, Not Smart Enough To Be A Lawyer, And His Hands Are Too Shaky To Perform Operations, He Becomes A Journalist.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

I Usually Need A Can Of Beer To Prime Me.

I Hate Everything Which Is Not In Myself.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Great Sex Is Apocalyptic. There Is No Such Thing As Great Sex Unless You Have An Apocalyptic Moment.

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.

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.

Reagan Bankrupted The Soviet Union By Increasing Armaments.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

Los Angeles Is A Constellation Of Plastic.

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

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

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.

God Is A Creator, Not A Law Giver.

The Desire For Success Lubricates Secret Prostitution In The Soul.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Is One Human? Or Merely Alive? Like A Blade Of Grass Equal To All Existance In The Moment It Is Torn? Yes. If Pain Is Fundament, Then A Blade Of Grass Can Know All There Is.

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

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.

You Never Do Find Out What Makes You Tick, And After A While It's Unimportant.

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

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.

Television Is Coitus Interruptus Brought Into Aesthetics.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The True Religion Of America Has Always Been America.

For What Does It Mean To Be A Hero? It Requires You To Be Prepared To Deal With Forces Larger Than Yourself.

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

Alimony Is The Curse Of The Writing Class.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Revolutions Are The Periods Of History When Individuals Count Most.

The Ultimate Tendency Of Liberalism Is Vegetarianism.

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.

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

Cute Friendship

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Harsh Words Live In The Dungeon Of The Heart

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.

You Have The Right To Speak Your Mind.

Speak Your Mind

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 Only Faithfulness People Have Is To Emotions They're Trying To Recapture

Once A Newspaper Touches A Story, The Facts Are Lost Forever, Even To The Protagonists.

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

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

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

Being A Real Writer Means Being Able To Do The Work On A Bad Day.

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 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.

There Is Nothing Safe About Sex. There Never Will Be.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

America Is A Hurricane, And The Only People Who Do Not Hear The Sound Are Those Fortunate If Incredibly Stupid And Smug White Protestants Who Live In The Center, In The Serene Eye Of The Big Wind.

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.

Dying Can't Be All That Difficult-up To Now Everyone Has Managed To Do It.

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

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

A Modern Democracy Is A Tyranny Whose Borders Are Undefined; One Discovers How Far One Can Go Only By Traveling In A Straight Line Until One Is Stopped.

Democracies Have

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

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.

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

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

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.

Trending Author

Giuseppe Garibaldi

Edward Hoagland

Category