Norman Mailer - Night Quotes

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New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington blink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.

Norman Mailer
One is hip or one is square, one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.

Norman Mailer
We are close to dead. There are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium; they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.

Norman Mailer
I would introduce myself if it were not useless. The name I had last night will not be the same as the name I have tonight. For the moment, then, let me say that I am thinking of Sam Slovoda.

Norman Mailer
So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purpose could be considered a white Negro.

Norman Mailer
The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high.

Norman Mailer
There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night.

Norman Mailer
A night journey on a bus was one of the few times when everything ambitious, wild, overconceived, hopeless, garish, and suffocatingly technical in American life nonetheless came together long enough to give the citizens a little peace, for it was only when they were on the move that Americans could feel anchored in their memories.

Norman Mailer
I knew that Jack needed a lot of help, and what he really needed was somebody who could spend a prodigious amount of time with him, every night, see him, live with him, live with him the way someone in A. A. lives with a drunk. … I wasn't doing that. So when the crime occurred — because I'd just been hoping things would work out all right — when the crime occurred, I knew that I had a responsibility on that one.

Norman Mailer