What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer — war, and the preparations for new war. - Norman Mailer

The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.

Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit.

I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt … that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it.