A Quote by Norman Mailer
A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.
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Only a great genius like the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell can be mother, wife and novelist without solitude. I couldn't write until my youngest child went to school, and then I began - the first morning - and I've never stopped.
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last. The acts of a nation may be triumphant by its good fortune; and its words mighty by the genius of a few of its children: but its art, only by the general gifts and common sympathies of the race.
Roth Unbound is filled with intelligent readings and smart judgments. Because of the author's sympathy and sharp mind, it offers real insight into the creative process itself, and into Philip Roth's high calling as a great American artist. The book is, in some ways, a radical rereading of Roth's life and his work. It is impossible, by the end, not to feel a tender admiration for Roth as a novelist and indeed for Claudia Roth Pierpont as an empathetic and brilliant critic.
Spinoza , for example, thought that insight into the essence of reality, into the harmonious structure of the eternal universe, necessarily awakens love for this universe. For him, ethical conduct is entirely determined by such insight into nature, just as our devotion to a person may be determined by insight into his greatness or genius. Fears and petty passions, alien to the great love of the universe, which is logos itself, will vanish, according to Spinoza, once our understanding of reality is deep enough.
A man may be a great statesman, and yet dislike his wife, and like somebody else's. A man may be a great hero, and yet he may have an unseemly passion, or an unpaid tailor. But the British public does not understand this. ... It thinks, unhappily or happily as you may choose to consider, that genius should keep the whole ten commandments. Now, genius is conspicuous for breaking them.
Humor is one of the elements of genius--admirable as an adjunct; but as soon as it becomes dominant, only a surrogate for genius.
It used to be that the highest ambition of American novelists was to write 'the Great American Novel,' that great white whale of American fiction that would encompass all the American experience in one great book.
since each child reads only about six hundred books in the course of childhood, each book should nourish them in some way - with new ideas, insight, humor, or vocabulary.
There's a book called 'Where The Wild Things Are,' by American writer Maurice Sendak... it really is the most sublime book. It's a picture book, but it works at so many levels, and it's fantastic.
Isadore [Duncan], who had an un-American genius for art, for organizing love, maternity, politics and pedagogy on a great personal scale, had also an un-American genius for grandeur.
A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.
Men of humor are always in some degree men of genius; wits are rarely so, although a man of genius may, amongst other gifts, possess wit, as Shakespeare.
An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.
The complete novelist would come into the world with a catalog of qualities like this. He would own the concentration of a Trappist monk, the organizational ability of a Prussian field marshal, the insight into human relations of a Viennese psychologist, the discipline of a man who prints the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin, the exquisite sense of timing of an Olympic gymnast, and by the way, a natural instinct and flair for exceptional use of language.
I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.
The utmost the American novelist can hope for, if he hopes at all to see his work included in the literature of his time, is that it may eventually be found to be along in the direction of the growing tip of collective consciousness. Preeminently the novelist's gift is that of access to the collective mind.
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