Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

Amateurs... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.

Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.

Mailer's Law: A thing either gets better or it costs more to run it the way it was.

I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.

It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.

There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.