Norman Spinrad > Quotes

“The saddest day of your life isn't when you decide to sell out. The saddest day of your life is when you decide to sell out and nobody wants to buy.”
― Norman Spinrad

“Cat Rambo: Where do you think the perennial debate between what is literary fiction and what is genre is sited?

Norman Spinrad: I think it’s a load of crap. See my latest column in Asimov’s, particularly re The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I detest the whole concept of genre. A piece of fiction is either a good story well told or it isn’t. The supposed dichotomy between “literary fiction” and “popular fiction” is ridiculous. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mailer, did not have serious literary intent? As writers of serious literary intent, they didn’t want to be “popular,” meaning sell a lot of books? They wanted to be unpopular and have terrible sales figures to prove they were “serious”?

I say this is bullshit and I say the hell with it. “Genre,” if it means anything at all, is a restrictive commercial requirement. “Westerns” must be set in the Old West. “Mysteries” must have a detective solving a crime, usually murder. “Nurse Novels” must have a nurse. And so forth.

In the strictly literary sense, neither science fiction nor fantasy are “genres.” They are anti-genres. They can be set anywhere and anywhen except in the mimetic here and now or a real historical period. They are the liberation of fiction from the constraints of “genre” in an absolute literary sense.”
― Norman Spinrad

“We shall give up the things of childhood --
gods and demons, planets and suns, guilts and regrets.”
― Norman Spinrad, Riding the Torch

“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, The Iron Dream

“You look as if you have bitten into a turd.”
― Norman Spinrad, Other Americas

“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, Child of Fortune

“You can't make a revolutionary omelet without breaking heads.”
― Norman Spinrad, Other Americas

“[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

“It ain't power that corrupts, it's the changes you put your head through getting it.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

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

“Kiss me, and you'll live forever. You'll be a frog, but you'll live forever.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“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, Bug Jack Barron

“Los Pilotos tienen un concepto muy exagerado de su propia importancia, pensó D'mahl. ¿Y en qué los convierte eso? - Tres... dos... uno... En seres humanos.”
― Norman Spinrad, Riding the Torch

“At least as coherent as the Gettysburg Address backwards in Albanian, anyway.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“[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, Bug Jack Barron

“Jerry’s fortune cookie said: “Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun.”
― Norman Spinrad, The Star-Spangled Future: Fourteen Stories in Search of the Future

“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, Bug Jack Barron

“Staring into the naked orange flames of the firepit, naked flesh, naked Carrie Donaldson on the bare rug in exhausted, sated semi-sleep beside him, Jack Barron felt a carapace of image-history-skin encysting him like steel walls of a TV set, a creature imprisoned in the electronic circuitry of his own head perceiving through promptboard vidphone fleshless electronic speed of light ersatz senses, separated from the girl beside him by the phosphor-dot impenetrable glass TV screen Great Wall of China of his own image.
First time I remember being blown feeling like wet put-down ugliness, he brooded. Ugly, he told himself, is a thing you feel — truth is ugly when it's a weapon, lie is beautiful when an act of love ugly when it's one-sided fuck is beautiful when it's simple, mutual, nobullshit balling, ugly when chick gets her kicks off you that really isn't there, is why you feel like a rotten lump of shit, man. Getting blown Sara go down being dug by woman's a pure gas; being sucked off, image-statue living lie, someone else's lie being eaten (Let me eat you, let me eat you, baby!) is a dirty act of plastic cannibalism, her dirtiness, not mine.
Whole world's full of plastic cannibals feeding their own little bags off meals of my goddamned image-flesh, eating Jack Barron ghost that isn't there. And now Morris and my so-called friend Luke are hot to package my living-color bod into TV dinners, sell to hundred million viewer-voter cannibals for thirty pieces of power silver.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“Dig: four cats in a smoke-filled room with star of television and groin-kneeing Jack Barron got the power to run me for President they say the word and Bennie Howards can buy the whole lot of ‘em out of petty cash, and he’s nothing but a prick with five hundred billion dollars I can think immelmanns around with my head tied behind my back. Thing is, it’s all show biz, is all, politics is nothing more than show biz with no class, and these high-powered vips are men just like me, only a little dumber.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“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.”
― Norman Spinrad, The Iron Dream

“I’ll do you a show, Howards, you’ll never believe. I’ll chop you to pieces, and be alive and immortal when you’re nothing but a lingering bad taste in a hundred million mouths, fried to a crisp in the electric chair, you Frankenstein axe-murderer you!”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“Yeah, there’s a real surge in seeing people with your name pinned on ‘em hanging on your words, real big charge, but it’s never enough, you gotta have more and more and more and that power-monkey gets bigger and bigger till there’s nothing left of you. And you forget why you got started in the first place. You stop caring, stop feeling, stop really trying to help people, start using ‘em... I’ll take show biz over politics any time—nice white-collar job keeps your hands clean.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“If the floating cultura contained its fair share and then some of subsidized children of fortune, wealthy sybarites, refugees from ennui, and their attendant parasitic organisms, did these not serve as a communal matrix for the merchants, artists, scientist, aesthetes, and pilgrims who travelled among the stars for higher purposes? In ancient days, the courts of monarchs served as similar distillations of the more rarefied essences of human culture; these too were gilded cages filled with self-pampered birds of paradise, but in their precincts were to be found the philosophers, artists, and mages of the age.”
― Norman Spinrad, The Void Captain's Tale

“The Pontiff has instructed me to convey his concern at the addition of psychedelics to the composition of the communion host in the Archdiocese of New York,”
― Norman Spinrad, No Direction Home

“Immortality—was electric-light slime reaching for the stars, and she stood poised on the brink, balanced on the razor-edge between life and death, the flickering and the eternal, the human and the immortal, sanity and the holy madness that was realer than sanity, more cogent, a path to oneness with the timeless infinite that could be hers if she had the courage to cast off her moorings to the shores of self and trust her fate to that all-forgiving sea.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“I'm not stoned now, Jack,' she said quietly. 'I'm straight, maybe straighter than I've ever been in my life. We all go through changes. I watched you go through yours, and I couldn't take it. Now I think I've gone through one of my own, a big one. It happens like that sometimes, six years of things just happening to you but not really getting through to your head, and then something, acid plus something, maybe something silly and meaningless triggers the big flash, and suddenly all those six years come through all the way at once and you feel them, feel the years before too, and all the possible futures, all in a moment, and nothing's happened in that moment that anyone else can see, but you're just not the same you anymore. There's a gap, a discontinuity, and you know you can't go back to being what you've been but you don't yet know what you are.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“She kissed him quick but deep with her tongue; bubbling over, she pulled away from his mouth, still in an arm-on-shoulders mutual embrace, said: 'Jack, Jack I watched you on television, I mean really watched you, really saw for the very first time what you were doing. You were magnificent, you were everything I always knew you would be the first day I met you in Berkeley, but better — better than anything I could've imagined—because then I was a girl, and you were a boy, and today you were a man, and I ... Well, maybe at the advanced age of thirty-five I'm leaving adolescence and I'm ready to try loving you the way a woman should love a man.'
'That's ... uh ... groovy,' he said, and now she thrilled even at the way he was preoccupied, the old Berkeley distant-focus preoccupation, thinking through her, above her, warm exciting man-thoughts enveloping her in him were the moments she had always loved him most.
'Groovy, and I dig what you're saying — I mean about us. But the show . . . look, Sara, there are things I've got to tell you. I mean, don't think I'm back in the silly old Baby Bolshevik bag. I suppose it looked that way to a lot of people, and there were moments when I ... but I don't do things without a reason, and there are things going on that—'
'I know, Jack,' she said. 'You don't even have to tell me. It stands out all over you. You're involved in something big, something important, the kind of thing you were always meant to do. Something real like you used to — '
'It's not what you think, not what anyone thinks,' he muttered, brows furrowed at some hidden contrapuntal train of thought. 'I don't even know the whole story myself. But I feel something, can smell it ... something so big, so ... I'm afraid to even think about it until I —”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“and the desperation turned her face into the kind of ugly mask you see around swimming pools in Las Vegas.”
― Norman Spinrad, No Direction Home