Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes.

The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart.

Communism is fascism with a human face.

Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.

...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.