What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up

... the place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when the see the real thing. For photographic images tend to subtract feeling from something we experience at first hand and the feelings they do arouse are, largely, not those we have in real life. Often something disturbs us more in photographed form than it does when we actually experience it.

Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.

Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.

taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.