Norman Mailer cytaty

strona 3

„Gdy kobieta już dostatecznie długo była naga, patrzy się znowu na jej twarz.”

„Komputery to najmądrzejsi kretyni.”

„Nie jest dobrym pomysłem umieszczanie swojej żony w powieści. Przynajmniej nie aktualnej żony.”

„Miłość bliźniego nie byłaby tak utrudniona, gdyby ten bliźni nie był tak blisko.”

„Rzadko kiedy czasy są surowsze niż ludzie.”

„Wyłączenie telewizora da się porównać jedynie z uczuciem błogości przy gaszeniu lampki nocnej.”

“The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.”

“In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.”

“Mysteries are irritated by facts.”

“The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.”

“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.”

“He was a fool — a brilliant man and I loved his beard, and there was the mountain ax in his brain, and all the blood poured out, and he could not see the Mexican sun. Your people raised the ax, and the last blood of revolutionary mankind, his poor blood, ran into the carpet.”

“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.”

“Chicago was a town where nobody could ever forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.”

“He felt a crude ecstasy. He could not have given the reason, but the mountain tormented him, beckoned him, held an answer to something he wanted. It was so pure, so austere.”

“His consolation in those hours when he was most uncharitable to himself is that taken at his very worst he was at least still worthy of being a character in a novel by Balzac, win one day, lose the next, and do it with boom! and baroque in the style.”

“We are as ugly as animals in our fashion, and unless we deal with the ugliness in ourselves, unless we deal with the violence in ourselves, the brutality in ourselves, and find some way to sublimate it, just to use Freud's term, into something slightly higher, we're never going to get anywhere with anything.”

“Hungry fighters win fights.”

“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.”

“To be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself — one must know one’s desires, one’s rages, one’s anguish, one must be aware of the character of one’s frustration and know what would satisfy it. The over-civilized man can be an existentialist only if it is chic, and deserts it quickly for the next chic.”

“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 ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism.”

“Eisenhower could stand as a hero only for that large number of Americans who were most proud of their lack of imagination.”

“I had my good looks, my blond hair, my height, build, and bullfighting school, I suppose I became one of the Village equivalents of an Eagle Scout badge for the girls. I was one of the credits needed for a diploma in the sexual humanities.”

“There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.”

“This is D. J., Disc Jockey to America turning off. Vietnam, hot dam.”

“When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.”

“Historical, religious, and existential treatises suggest that for some persons at some times, it is rational not to avoid physical death at all costs. Indeed the spark of humanity can maximize its essence by choosing an alternative that preserves the greatest dignity and some tranquility of mind.”

“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.”

“It might be more difficult to be a President than it ever had before. Nothing less than greatness would do.”

“Politics in America is still different from politics anywhere else because the politics has arisen out of the immediate needs, ambitions, and cupidities of the people, that our politics still smell of the bedroom and the kitchen, rather than having descended to us from the chill punctilio of aristocratic negotiation.”

“What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person … They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.”

“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.”

“West of the Amphitheatre, railroad sidings seemed to continue on for miles, accompanied by those same massive low sheds larger than armories, with pens for tens of thousands of frantic beasts, cattle, sheep, and pigs, animals in an orgy of gorging and dropping and waiting and smelling blood. In the slaughterhouses, during the day, a carnage worthy of the Disasters of War took place each morning and afternoon.”

“However could he organize his novel? What form to give it? It is so complex. Too loose, thinks Sam, too scattered.”