Norman Mailer cytaty

strona 5

„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.”

“One gets the impression that people come to Los Angeles in order to divorce themselves from the past, here to live or try to live in the rootless pleasure world of an adult child.”

“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.”

“I hate everything which is not in myself.”

“The twentieth century may yet be seen as that era when civilized man and underprivileged man were melted together into mass man.”

“The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.”

“The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.”

“The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.”

“Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.”

“The need of the city is to accelerate growth; the pride of the small town is to retard it.”

“There was never a revolution to equal it, and never a city more glorious than Petrograd, and for all that period of my life I lived another and braved the ice of winter and the summer flies in Vyborg while across my adopted country of the past, winds of the revolution blew their flame, and all of us suffered hunger while we drank at the wine of equality.”

“Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.”

“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.”

“For years Pershing Square has been one of the three or four places in America famous to homosexuals, famous not for its posh, the chic is round-heeled here, but because it is one of the avatars of good old masturbatory sex, dirty with the crusted sugars of smut, dirty rooming houses around the corner where the score is made, dirty book and photograph stores down the street.”

“Eleanor Roosevelt, fine, precise, hand-worked like ivory. Her voice was almost attractive … One had the impression of a lady who was finally becoming a woman, which is to say that she was just a little bitchy about it all; nice bitchy, charming, it had a touch of art to it, but it made one wonder if she were not now satisfying the last passion of them all, which was to become physically attractive, for she was better-looking than she had ever been.”

“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.”

“With the pride of an artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance.”

“One can indeed be restored, by an exceptional demonstration of love.”

“There is probably no sensitive heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.”

“The novelist, thinks Sam, perspiring beneath blankets, 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. The feminine in his nature cries out for proof he is a man; he loves himself and therefore despises all that he is.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It is the smell of the stockyards, all of it taken together, a smell so bad one must go down to visit the killing of the animals or never eat meat again. Watching the animals be slaughtered, one knows the human case — no matter how close to angel we may come, the butcher is equally there.”

“Kennedy's most characteristic quality is the remote and private air of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, of loss and gain, of nearness to death, which leaves him isolated from the mass of others.”

“In tranquility one recollects them with affection, their instinct is good, crazy family good.”

“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.”

“It was almost as if there were no peace unless one could fight well, kill well (if always with honor), love well and love many. … It was as if the message in the labyrinth of the genes would insist that violence was locked with creativity, and adventure was the secret of love.”

“Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.”

“The storm approaches its thunderhead, and it is apparent that the boat drifts ever closer to shore. So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.”

“I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.”