Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
Norman MailerRead
I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the balance between violence and self-discipline in boxing, portraying it as a form of art and existential experience.
Norman Mailer's quote sheds light on the paradox of boxing, where the raw violence typically associated with the sport is tempered by the rigorous self-discipline that boxers must cultivate. He suggests that boxing transcends mere physical confrontations, elevating it to an art form that reflects deeper existential themes, making some fights resonate on a more profound level than others.
Themes
BoxingArtDisciplineViolenceExistential
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about overcoming adversity, one could use this quote to illustrate the balance of strength and restraint.
More from Norman Mailer
All quotes →I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.
Norman MailerRead
There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.
Norman MailerRead
The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
Norman MailerRead
Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing
Norman MailerRead
At bottom, I mean profoundly at bottom, the FBI has nothing to do with Communism, it has nothing to do with catching criminals, it has nothing to do with the Mafia, the syndicate, it has nothing to do with trust-busting, it has nothing to do with interstate commerce, it has nothing to do with anything but serving as a church for the mediocre. A high church for the true mediocre.
Norman MailerRead
Similar quotes
Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.
Jay-ZRead
When I make a film I'm always in reality among the trees, and among the people like yourselves. There's no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality as there is in literature. The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality.
Pier Paolo PasoliniRead
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.
John SteinbeckRead
Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.
Theodor W. AdornoRead
My only problem with fans is when they turn pro. For example, when all the professional writers were fired by DC in the '60s, they brought in a generation of comic book fans who would have paid to have written these stories.
Alan MooreRead
Architecture depends on facts, but its real field of activity lies in the realm of the significance.
Ludwig Mies Van Der RoheRead