A Quote by Norman Mailer

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again; it has perhaps not been here so intensely in thirty years, not since the Nazis were prospering, but it is coming back.
The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
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.
Since I was a small child, I'd believed we were inherently perfect, and that we had to keep coming back again and again until we recognized our innate perfection.
Now they came back to him, on this night he was seventeen years old. All the years and places of his brief broken life came within mind's reach and made a whole again. He knew once more, at last, after this long, bitter, waisted time, who he was and where he was. But where he must go in the years to come, that he could not see; and he feared to see it.
If you write something in the evening or at night, look back over it the next morning. I tend to be less self-critical at night; sometimes, I've looked back at things I wrote the night before, and realized they were no good at all.
I've been to Africa many times in the past 20 years, but I can't believe this is the first time since the very first Red Nose Day, that I've been back to Ethiopia. The last time I was here was just after the famine and it was crazy, there were people all over the place, kids without families, aid workers, camera crews.
I think we have some serious problems now, but, if you look back over the last thirty or forty years that my book deals with, I think we are in better shape now than we would have been if all of those cases had not come down.
We have to bring back law and order. In a place like Chicago, where thousands of people have been killed, thousands over the last number of years, in fact, almost 4,000 have been killed since Barack Obama became president, over - almost 4,000 people in Chicago have been killed. We have to bring back law and order.
When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.
Alex Smith, what he’s done over the last two years for this football team, this is a mistake in not starting him. He needs to be the guy and it’s going to be tough if (Colin) Kaepernick doesn’t play well today and now you’re coming back saying, ‘Alex, we’re going to put you back in there.’
As the years pass, I find that writers who were once central to me aren't anymore. I revered Yeats's poetry in college. I respect it now and am still ravished by certain lines, but I don't go back to him again and again. I do go back to Emily Dickinson again and again.
Our civilization has fallen out of touch with night. With lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars?
I was a teenager when General Zia took power in the Pakistan; I was in my twenties when I went there during the late 1980s and I saw then not only the novel punishments that he was introducing - because they were novel, and this is again something that's very important to understand, it's only in the last thirty, forty years, since 1979 in fact, that these penalties have been revived anywhere in the world apart from Saudi Arabia.
When these guitar mags bring up that stuff up and say such and such came up with this and that which is pushing the boundaries, I just say, "let's step back for a minute and admit something: nothing has happened for the last 100 years." And it's okay. It's not a bad thing ... We're all working with "tools" that have been in existence for the last 100 years and there hadn't been a new "tool" for a long long time.
You kind of get the same adjectives coming back over again and over again describing millennials. I think the national rhetoric around this generation is unfairly negative.
You'll have days of complete lack of faith in your abilities. But you have to keep coming back. That's when you know you're a writer - when you take the failures and appear at the desk again, over and over again.
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