
Norman Mailer passed away this weekend. To remember him we've reposted an interview from with Mailer and his son John from March, 2006. Read an excerpt below, or
go here
for the full text.
Isn't that boredom [that comes from marriage] antithetical to sexual
passion?
Of course. But that's also part of it. When you're driving a car that has five
hundred horsepower, you need some kind of brakes. All right, that's a crude
image [laughs]. All I'm getting
at is that very often, highly sexed people get married in order to have an
outlet. [pause] Let me see, I
can say something better than that. What a way to end up, huh? You could hang
yourself with a sentence like that. [long
pause, throat clearing] People, whether highly sexed or not, often
need a machine like a relationship, something like an accelerator and a brake.
Marriage allows you to do that very well. It's the soft machine of society.