Norman Mailer cytaty

strona 4

„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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.”

“Politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.”

“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.”

“Los Angeles is the home of self-expression, but the artists are middle-class and middling-minded; no passions will calcify here for years in the gloom to be revealed a decade later as the tessellations of hard and fertile work. … In this land of the pretty-pretty, the virility is in the barbarisms, the vulgarities, it is in the huge billboards, the screamers of the neon lighting, the shouting farm-utensil colors of the gas stations and monster drugstores, it is in the swing of the sports cars, hot rods, convertibles.”

“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.”

“He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co-ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, "Give me the co-ordinates."… The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea…. Hot dog!”

“There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.”

“There was Johnson (Lyndon) who had compromised too many contradictions and now the contradictions were in his face: when he smiled the corners of his mouth squeezed gloom; when he was pious, his eyes twinkled irony; when he spoke in a righteous tone, he looked corrupt; when he jested, the ham in his jowls looked to quiver. He was not convincing. He was a Southern politician, a Texas Democrat, a liberal Eisenhower; he would do no harm, he would do no good, he would react to the machine, good fellow, nice friend -- the Russians would understand him better than his own. … Johnson gave you all of himself, he was a political animal, he breathed like an animal, sweated like one, you knew his mind was entirely absorbed with the compendium of political fact and maneuver.”

“There could be no politics which gave warmth to one's body until the country had recovered its imagination, its pioneer lust for the unexpected and incalculable.”

“And all the bright young people of his youth had butted their heads, smashed against things until they got weaker and the things still stood.”

“Pompous words and long pauses which lay like a leaden pain over fever, the fever that one is in, over, or is it that one is just behind history?”

“You carried it alone as long as you could, and then you weren't strong enough to take it any longer. You kept fighting everything, and everything broke you down, until in the end you were just a little goddam bolt holding on and squealing when the machine went too fast.”

“I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.”

“Mystery is an emotion which is repugnant to a political animal.”

“Witches have no wit, said the magician who was weak. Hula, hula, said the witches.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Why else lead a life of bad banquet dinners, cigar smoke, camp chairs, foul breath, and excruciatingly dull jargon if not to avoid the echoes of what is not known.”

“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 and caution were identical.”

“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.”

“James Farley. Huge. Cold as a bishop. The hell he would consign you to was cold as ice.”

“I knew that Jack needed a lot of help, and what he really needed was somebody who could spend a prodigious amount of time with him, every night, see him, live with him, live with him the way someone in A. A. lives with a drunk. … I wasn't doing that. So when the crime occurred — because I'd just been hoping things would work out all right — when the crime occurred, I knew that I had a responsibility on that one.”

“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.”

“New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington wink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.”

“Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.”

“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.”

“He has wasted the day, he tells himself, he has wasted the day as he has wasted so many days of his life … while that huge work with which he has cheated himself, that enormous novel which would lift him at a bound from the impasse in which he stifles, whose dozens of characters would develop a vision of life in bountiful complexity, lies foundering, rotting on a beach of purposeless effort. Notes here, pages there, it sprawls through a formless wreck of incidental ideas and half-episodes; utterly without shape. He is not even a hero for it.”