America is a cruel soil for talent. It stunts it, blights it, uproots it,
or overheats it with cheap fertilizer. And our literary gardeners, our
publishers, editors, reviewers and general flunkeys, are drunks, cowards,
respectables, prose couturiers, fashion-mongers, old maids, time servers,
and part-time pimps on the Avenue of President Madison. The audiences are
not much better--they seem to consist in nine parts of the tense, tasteless
victims of a mass-media culture, incapable of confronting a book unless it
is successful. -- Norman Mailer (1932- )
