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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.

-Norman Mailer

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We Are Close To

Norman Mailer

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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.

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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.

The Ultimate Tendency Of Liberalism Is Vegetarianism.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Any Workout Which Does Not Involve A Certain Minimum Of Danger Or Responsibility Does Not Improve The Body - It Just Wears It Out.

...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.

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

It All Comes Down To Who Does The Dishes.

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

The Desire For Success Lubricates Secret Prostitution In The Soul.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Reagan Bankrupted The Soviet Union By Increasing Armaments.

Nearly Everything In The Scheme Of Things Works To Dull A First-rate Talent. But The Worst Probably Is Cowardice.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Boredom Slays More Of Existence Than War.

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.

A High Church For The True Mediocre.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

We Are In Love With The Word. We Are Proud Of It. The Word Precedes The Formation Of The State. The Word Comes To Us From Every Avatar Of Early Human Existence. As Writers, We Are Obliged More Than Others To Keep Our Lives Attached To The Primitive Power Of The Word. From India, Out Of The Vedas, We Still Hear: On The Spoken Word, All The Gods Depend, All Beasts And Men; In The World Live All Creatures...the Word Is The Name Of The Divine World.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

I Hate Everything Which Is Not In Myself.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Harsh Words Live In The Dungeon Of The Heart

No Heart Is So Hard As The Timid Heart.

Mike Lee Writes With Honesty, Penetration, Wit And The Ability To Surprise The Reader With An Unexpected Turn From Time To Time That Enriches The Experience.

There Are These Two Kinds Of Patriotism. There's Blind Patriotism, Unflagging Patriotism. And Then There's The Patriotism That Says I Live In A Democracy And It's Very Important For The Health And The Life Of This Democracy That It Get Better All The Time, Not Get Worse.

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.

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

Psychoanalysis And Zen, In My Private Psychic Geometry, Are Equal To Nicotine. They Are Anti-existential. Nicotine Quarantines One Out Of Existence.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Writers Don't Have Lifestyles. They Just Sit In Little Rooms And Write.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Way You Write Affects What You Say.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

God Is A Creator, Not A Law Giver.

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

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.

I Usually Need A Can Of Beer To Prime Me.

You Have The Right To Speak Your Mind.

Speak Your Mind

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Alimony Is The Curse Of The Writing Class.

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

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.

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

I Become An Actor, A Quick-change Artist, As If I Can Trap The Prince Of Truth In The Act Of Switching A Style.

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

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

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.

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.

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'.

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 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.

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.

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

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

Television Is Coitus Interruptus Brought Into Aesthetics.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

The Mark Of Mediocrity Is To Look For Precedent.

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.

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

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

Writing Books Is The Closest Men Ever Come To Childbearing.

The Natural Role Of Twentieth-century Man Is Anxiety.

Cancer Is The Growth Of Madness Denied.

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.

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.

Revolutions Are The Periods Of History When Individuals Count Most.

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

I Had A Quick Grasp Of The Secret To Sanity, It Had Become The Ability To Hold The Maximum Of Impossible Combinations In One's Mind.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Faction Is That Hybrid Of Documented Fact And Novelistic Elaboration.

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

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.

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