“ Characters in novels sometimes radiate more energy, therefore, when we don’t enter their mind. It is one of the techniques a novelist acquires instinctively—don’t go into your protagonist’s thoughts u… Norman Mailer
“ Then the Warden said, Do you have anything you’d like to say? and Gary looked up at the ceiling and hesitated, then said, Let’s do it. That was it. The most pronounced amount of courage, Vern decided,… Norman Mailer
“ Sometimes I think our future existence will depend on whether we can keep false information from proliferating too rapidly. If our power to verify the facts does not keep pace, then distortions of inf… Norman Mailer
“ Red had a deep loathing of the night before them. He had been through so much combat, had felt so many kinds of terror, and had seen so many men killed that he no longer had any illusions about the in… Norman Mailer
“ It was getting to be the best conversation she ever had. She had always thought the only way to have conversations like that was in your head. Then Norman Mailer
“ As the Maestro is never loath to tell us, a human who suffers from too much ambition succeeds only in exemplifying the Creator’s own lack of anticipation. The D.K., wishing His Vision to be innovative… Norman Mailer
“ The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, 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 a… Norman Mailer
“ More sensitive than others in the beginning, we have to develop the will, the stamina, the determination, and the insensitivity to take critical abuse. A good writer, therefore, does well to see himse… Norman Mailer
“ American’s capacity for real estate improvement; build yourself a house, grow fat in it, and die. Norman Mailer
“ Craft protects one from facing endless expanding realities—the terror, let us say, of losing your novel in the depths of philosophical insights you are not ready to live with. Norman Mailer
“ 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. Eit… Norman Mailer
“ I heard from clear across the city, over the Hudson in the Jersey yards, one fierce whistle of a locomotive which took me to a train late at night hurling through the middle of the West, its iron shri… Norman Mailer
“ 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… Norman Mailer
