Quotes from book
The Presidential Papers

Name: The Presidential Papers
Author: Norman Mailer

The Presidential Papers is a collection of essays, interviews, poems, open letters to political figures, and magazine pieces written by Norman Mailer, published in 1963 by G.P. Putnam's Sons. It is, by Mailer's own admission, similar in structure and purpose to Advertisements for Myself, albeit with a relatively stronger focus on contemporary politics, although many other topics are touched upon. The book covers such topics as scatology, totalitarianism, aesthetics, fascism, the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, Jean Genet's 1958 play The Blacks, juvenile delinquency, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Fidel Castro, masturbation, and others.

“Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.”

Norman Mailer book The Presidential Papers

Preface
The Presidential Papers (1963)
Context: Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.

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

Norman Mailer book The Presidential Papers

Preface
The Presidential Papers (1963)

“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.”

Norman Mailer book The Presidential Papers

Preface
The Presidential Papers (1963)

“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.”

Norman Mailer book The Presidential Papers

The Presidential Papers (1963)

“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.”

Norman Mailer book The Presidential Papers

The Fourth Presidential Paper — Foreign Affairs : Letter To Castro
The Presidential Papers (1963)