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 through life, meeting ambitious challenges or failing so completely as to succeed artistically. Mailer’s failures were akin to those Joyce spoke about: “A
 man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
+People always asked Norman why he didn’t write an autobiography. He
+answered me in an interview that was published in Provincetown Arts in 1999:
+“The main reason is that I don’t want to use up my crystals. What I mean is
+that certain experiences have an inner purity to them. They remind me of a
+crystal. I use the word advisedly. Your imagination can project through this
+experience in one direction, and you can have one piece of fiction. You can
+project through the same crystal in another direction and have another piece
+of fiction. What I call a crystal experience is not a simple one, rather a most
+complex one, but it has this other quality that it can be studied from many
+different angles to produce many results. So, whenever you write about a
+crystal experience, you are dynamiting one of your richest narrative sources.
+I don’t want to write an autobiography, because that would mean I’m done as
+a writer. I’ve never written about any of my wives, for just that reason.”