Normal Mailer Quote Plastics

We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore; we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, … their touch was alien to nature. … [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.

Norman Mailer (1968). “The idol and the octopus: political writings, on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations”