Mailer Quotes
As it turns out, Mailer comes close to solving the mystery [of Lee Harvey Oswald], but he never establishes the tragedy. Dreiser's tale was tragic and American because it happened every day. Oswald made only one notch in the calendar. It was meaningless; he just renamed an airport, violently.
...Oswald's life was not a cry of pain so much as a squawk for attention. He achieved geopolitical significance by the shortest possible route. He was not an example of post-modern absurdity but one of its messiahs: an inspiration to the glazed loner. He killed Kennedy not to impress Jodie Foster. He killed Kennedy to impress Clio - the muse of history.
Martin Amis
No one in the history of the written word, not even William MacGonagall, or Spike Milligan or D. H. Lawrence, is so wide open to damaging quotation. Try this, more or less at random: 'A murderer in the moment of his murder could feel a sense of beauty and perfection as complete as the transport of a saint.' Or this: Film is a phenomenon whose resemblance to death has been ignored for too long. His italics.
On every page Mailer will come up with a formulation both grandiose and crass. This is expected of him. It is also expected of the reviewer to introduce a lingering 'yet' or 'however' at some point, and say that 'somehow' Mailer's 'fearless honesty' redeems his notorious excesses. He isn't frightened of sounding outrageous; he isn't frightened of making a fool of himself; and, above all, he isn't frightened of being boring. Well, fear has its uses. Perhaps he ought to be a little less frightened of being frightened.
Martin Amis
Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can't explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery. ... If I'd found out that Norman Mailer liked me, I'd have killed myself. I think he was too hung up. I'm glad Kurt Vonnegut didn't like me either. He had problems, terrible problems. He couldn't see the world the way I see it. I suppose I'm too much Pollyanna, he was too much Cassandra. Actually I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past - a combination of both. But I don't think I'm too overoptimistic.
Ray Bradbury
My mom was always my biggest teacher, my inspiration, my role model. My mom was just the most amazing person. She was like a bon vivant in that she just lived each day to the fullest. As soon as I became a vegetarian, she became a vegetarian. ... I was actually inspired by a book she was reading that I picked up off the nightstand when I was about 13. It was a Norman Mailer book [Miami and the Siege of Chicago] and it had a very graphic scene of the slaughterhouses in Chicago. So I read that and I said, "I love animals. I don't want to be a part of that system."
Christie Brinkley
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer died last year at the age of 84 years old. For the last 60 years of this man's life, he drank to excess every day. Uh, he was married six times. He smoked pot. He stabbed his second wife. And I've never read one of his books, but I gotta tell you I'm a huge fan.
Ron White
