Norman Mailer Quotes

I don't do really well in cities, which is crazy given that we're flying in and out of these major cities every week.

When I first arrived (in New York), it seemed to me the most terrifying city in the world... all those big buildings. I remember walking on Broadway, looking up at this huge, mountainous place-and being so lonely. But things started to clear up when I met a few people on the street whom I'd met before-all of a sudden there got to be a certain familiarity about the place, and the terror kind of evaporated. There was a lot of playing going on, and the New Yorkers, of course, were a completely different crowd from what I'd known.

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.

Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.

The streets of a modern city are depressing. They are so aimless and so weak in their lines and their masses, that the mind and senses jog on their way like passengers in a train with blinds down in an overcrowded carriage.

The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is the fact that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable. ... No nation with any sense of material well-being would endure the food we eat, the cramped apartments we live in, the noise, the traffic, the crowded subways and buses. American life, in large cities, at any rate, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves.

I went back and studied the game, was a student of the game and worked on my craft and dedicated myself, you know? A lot of my music revolves around me growing up in Compton. I want to tell a different story that's never been told before, of a good kid in a mad city.

More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.

I love shooting in New York because I love the city. Ultimately, I like doing it there and the city is important to the story, but it can be hard to shoot where you live too because it is so all-absorbing.

I'm a creature of the New York City streets.

One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.

The modern city hardly knows a pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.

In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?

If a person is found dead here, a postmorten will always reveal whether he has spent less than three weeks in the city. That is the length of time it takes this pollution to invade the body, after which it is there forever.

A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral.

I love New York, but it's a rough city. It's not dangerous now the way it was in the 70's or the 80's, but it's still a rough city. It's hard to hack it there. Life is harder than it is on the West Coast. To be able to deal with that, you have to have a lot of aspirational feelings pinned on being there.

I have found by experience that they who have spent all their lives in cities, improve their talents but impair their virtues; and strengthen their minds but weaken their morals.

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.

Through that windshield I saw a city that didn’t know it was hungry and a reflection of a guy who was FREE.

D.C. is a hard city to grow up in. I couldn't find my footing there. Also, I got a late start academically, and I was dyslexic.

The city atmosphere certainly has improved her. Some way she doesn't seem like the same woman.

Cities force us to interact with strangers and with the strange. They pry the mind open. And that is why they are the idea that has unleashed so many of our new ideas.

I walked around Soho's street for over an hour, running into familiar faces but never once stopping to chat. It was then that I felt something discomforting and comforting all at once. I didn't want to be here, in this city, anymore.