NORMAN MAILER, America’s greatest living novelist, raged against terrorism last night and said that the remaining steel prongs of the World Trade Centre would inevitably become a national monument. “It is more beautiful than the building was,” Mr Mailer, 78, who described the towers as “two huge buck teeth”, said. “I think they will keep it. If they have any sense they will. And politicians usually have exactly that kind of sense, if no other. I don’t disapprove of that. You’ve got that many people killed who’ve had nothing to do with bringing on their own death other than working in a monument to corporatism.”
Mr Mailer was speaking to The Times from his home in Provincetown on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. He said that like everyone else in America he had been watching television non-stop for hours. “That only happens a few times in your life. Jack Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy. Martin Luther King. Maybe ten times.”