I had my good looks, my blond hair, my height, build, and bullfighting school, I suppose I became one of the Village equivalents of an Eagle Scout ba… - Norman Mailer

We are as ugly as animals in our fashion, and unless we deal with the ugliness in ourselves, unless we deal with the violence in ourselves, the brutality in ourselves, and find some way to sublimate it, just to use Freud's term, into something slightly higher, we're never going to get anywhere with anything.

City Point is so beautiful, she says. In the night they cannot see the garbage that litters the beach, the seaweed and driftwood, the condoms that wallow sluggishly on the foam’s edge, discarded on the shore like the minuscule loathsome animals of the sea. Yeah, it’s something, he says slowly.

With the pride of an artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance.