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.
The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
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.
Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
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.
Goldstein, you’d be a pretty good boy if you wasn’t so chicken.
So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
Mailer’s Law: A thing either gets better or it costs more to run it the way it was.
Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.
One will feel the same subtle nausea coming into the city or waiting to depart from it that one feels now in such plastic catacombs as O’Hare’s reception center in Chicago.
As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery.
Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.
Since great writers communicate a vision of existence, one can’t borrow their methods. The method is married to the vision.
Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic; San Francisco is a lady.
Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
I hate everything which is not in myself.
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.
Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
The world’s not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.