Norman Spinrad Quotes & Sayings

I believe that interest in heroes is universal and eternal. — Norman Spinrad

As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography. — Norman Spinrad

For Feric Jaggar is essentially a monster: a narcissistic psychopath with paranoid obsessions. His total self-assurance and certainty is based on a total lack of introspective self-knowledge. In a sense, such a human being would be all surface and no interior. He would be able to manipulate the surface of social reality by projecting his own pathologies upon it, but he would never be able to share in the inner communion of interpersonal relationships. Such a creature could give a nation the iron leadership and sense of certainty to face a mortal crisis, but at what cost? Led by the likes of a Feric Jaggar, we might gain the world at the cost of our souls. No, — Norman Spinrad

We shall give up the things of childhood --
gods and demons, planets and suns, guilts and regrets. — Norman Spinrad

It's trite to say that the world has gotten smaller in the age of globalization, but my travels have told me that it's wrong to think this means there is some kind of uniform world culture. — Norman Spinrad

[SF] was a commercial genre born in the old adventure pulp magazines
of the first third of the twentieth century, aimed primarily at
adolescent males, which, over the decades, in fits and starts,
evolved into an intellectually credible, scientifically germane,
transcendental literature without losing its popular base.

Of what other literature in the history of the western world can
this truly be said? — Norman Spinrad

I must admit to being greatly influenced by Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces. — Norman Spinrad

If I had parallel lives to pursue, I would also want one as a painter. — Norman Spinrad

English is taking over the world. I just wrote a piece about it. And it's not by design. The United States dominates because it's the biggest market. — Norman Spinrad

You look as if you have bitten into a turd. — Norman Spinrad

There are certain things that ordinary people have that celebrities don't have. — Norman Spinrad

Who was really the cop-out, Jack who went and got what he needed to make his dream real, molding a Jack Barron reality to the shape of his dreams, or me, shaping dreams to the size of mundane reality — Norman Spinrad

I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness. — Norman Spinrad

Mexico was conquered more by manipulation of myth and archetype. — Norman Spinrad

The world has become more complex as technology and easy travel mixes cultures without homogenizing them. — Norman Spinrad

You can really do more than you think you can do. — Norman Spinrad

It ain't power that corrupts, it's the changes you put your head through getting it. — Norman Spinrad

I get work because I'm primarily a novelist but I've become script doctor. I can work back and forth between French and English. — Norman Spinrad

America was becoming the world's best-defended Third World country, and the best and the brightest were collaborating in the process. — Norman Spinrad

[P]ower, terrible, unprecedented power, and with it came the unavoidable choice that had faced every power-junkie since time began: to have the sheer gall to fake being something greater than a man, or cop-out on the millions who had poured a part of themselves into your image and be something less. — Norman Spinrad

Stay a dreamer, and you'll never have your dream; get down in the nitty-gritty, and when you get your dream you see what horseshit it was in the first place. — Norman Spinrad

In America, if you don't do a 100 million dollars, you've done nothing. — Norman Spinrad

Kiss me, and you'll live forever. You'll be a frog, but you'll live forever. — Norman Spinrad

Therefore, since I could count on no continuity of sapient will to carry me through, indeed since all that was certain was that I must suffer repeated loss of same in order to maintain my body's vitality, my only course was to accomplish with what I hoped was the greater puissance of conscious craft what I had already once barely managed to achieve by accident of fate.

Which was to use these periods of conscious lucidity to engrave a mantric tropism upon the presentient levels of my mind with perpetual chanting repetition and diligent meditation, so that even when reason and conscious will had once more fled, my Bloomenkind self would, during periods of enforced floral nirvana, be programmed to follow the yellow, to follow the sun that sooner or later must rise during a cycle of such meditations into its percept sphere.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road ... — Norman Spinrad

When you're in the States and you're a writer and you've got money and you walk into a bank, you're a bum with money. — Norman Spinrad

The saddest day of your life is when you decide to sell out, and nobody wants to buy. — Norman Spinrad

If it's not American, the French won't go see it. — Norman Spinrad

Chaos is the enemy of Order but the enemy of Chaos is also the enemy of Order — Norman Spinrad

The opprobrium of assholes is a badge of honor. — Norman Spinrad

I'm not gifted, but I'm not hopeless. — Norman Spinrad

You can't make a revolutionary omelet without breaking heads. — Norman Spinrad

At least as coherent as the Gettysburg Address backwards in Albanian, anyway. — Norman Spinrad

Science fiction is anything published as science fiction. — Norman Spinrad

I was a precocious reader. — Norman Spinrad

The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel. — Norman Spinrad

I never learned to read music. — Norman Spinrad