“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.”

— Norman Mailer

Source: The Man Who Studied Yoga (1956), Ch. 5

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Norman Mailer 165

American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film m… 1923–2007

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