Mailer on the '70s—Decade of "Image, Skin Flicks and Porn"

You can perform a large collective feat in a society only if you have an emergency or a dictatorship. Otherwise, it's just too difficult. The process of democratic argument blunts the attempt.

An idea to "restore nervous tissue to the city"
There are very simple, profound steps that can be taken to deal with many of the nation's problems.

For example, years ago when I ran for mayor of New York, I had one particularly happy idea: "Sweet Sunday." Once a month, everything would stop except what was needed for absolute emergencies. The only cars that could move would be ambulances and, conceivably, a police car or two. Everybody else would walk because there would be no subways. The idea was to let the city have a sense of peace once a month. I thought that this stoppage might restore an awful lot of nervous tissue to the city.

Something of that sort could be applied to America as a whole if we wanted to save energy. Just think—nothing moving one day a month! It would be a formal holiday. These are the kinds of changes that are needed. But I see nothing in the political atmosphere that would lead to such changes.

Mailer's metamorphosis of motive
I once had the vanity or the conceit that I could comprehend the country. I dared to present myself as a doctor with prescriptions. I don't have that arrogance any longer. I've come to the point where I don't even know what the trouble is, so I have lost a certain interest in writing about problems in this country. They're almost too large.

I used to write with the idea of changing the ways in which other people think, but now probably what I am most interested in is the way in which I think. The only way I can come close to understanding how others think is to discover what the nature of my own thought is.

Literary style: "A tool for exploring reality"
The world is more mysterious than our assumptions about it. The only way to try to find out what it is all about is to come to know something very well, and it may be that the thing I am closest to is the process of my own thought.

That's one reason why I injected myself as a central figure in my books for so long: It seemed to me that the best way I could show others what an event was like was to show them the way I perceived it and thereby enable them to look at it with a certain perspective.

When you get into doing a book, you find each has its own life—or lack of it. You have to almost invent a strategy for writing a book. The style you choose is a part of that strategy: It is a tool for exploring reality. Different realities call for different styles, different modes of perception.

Impact of "blockbusters"
The emphasis on the big blockbuster book is harmful to serious writing. If you can't earn money at a certain kind of writing, then there's a tendency not to write that way.

For example, I was never tempted to explore the possibilities of the short story because, economically speaking, it was just not terribly feasible. So if authors simply can't make a living by writing well-turned novels that don't sell a great deal, then that type of writing is going to disappear.

If the focus continues on blockbuster books, then writing is going to become a little bit more like producing movies: There'll be more and more people in on it, and it will become a collective effort. To that extent, the aesthetics will be leeched out.

But resistance to blockbusters may develop.For one thing, it's probably less agreeable for authors to work for a big publishing house that manufactures blockbusters than to work for a house that, at least in part, has a serious literary intent.

I also think that if the country heads into a large depression, the age of the blockbuster may be over. We may go back to the kind of publishing we had in the '30s, when small houses put out a few books.