Growth is a greater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth.
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind.
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.
Boredom slays more of existence than war.
Every moment of one’s existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
I don’t think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
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.
Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.