Top 100 Norman Mailer Quotes
#1. Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.
Norman Mailer
#2. Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It's an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.
Norman Mailer
#3. In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.
Norman Mailer
#4. The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
Norman Mailer
#5. Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.
Norman Mailer
#6. A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
Norman Mailer
#7. Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree.
Norman Mailer
#8. A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.
Norman Mailer
#9. What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.
Norman Mailer
#10. Retaining the phrases was a treacherous enterprise, however. His greatest problem these days had been boredom. Now he had discovered its loyal assistant - poor memory!
Norman Mailer
#11. Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.
Norman Mailer
#12. It all seems more reasonable and possible until you put it figuratively, until the metaphorical end, which is always the muzzle if you come down to it, blasts you in the face.
Norman Mailer
#13. Let the passions and cupidities and dreams and kinks and ideals and greed and hopes and foul corruptions of all men and women have their day and the world will still be better off, for there is more good than bad in the sum of us and our workings.
Norman Mailer
#15. Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get.
Norman Mailer
#16. All you need do is nod. I already know nine parts in ten of what he will say, but it is like fishing. Be patient, and you will get what you came for.
Norman Mailer
#17. There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night.
Norman Mailer
#18. A democracy depends upon people getting brighter all the time. Democracies are delicate. They're not just ipso facto and just go on and on.
Norman Mailer
#19. I don't read other writers because I'm writing all the time. It's too disturbing to read a writer with a good style when you're in the middle of putting your work together.
Norman Mailer
#20. Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.
Norman Mailer
#21. It was getting to be the best conversation she ever had. She had always thought the only way to have conversations like that was in your head. Then
Norman Mailer
#22. What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.
Norman Mailer
#23. Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Norman Mailer
#24. You let everything stand until it's knocked over and then you go over and write your own ruins
Norman Mailer
#25. We didn't win the Cold War, we were just a big bank that bankrupted a smaller bank because we had an arms race that wiped the Russians out.
Norman Mailer
#26. The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
Norman Mailer
#27. The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.
Norman Mailer
#28. Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
Norman Mailer
#29. Love is simple to understand if you haven't got a mind soft and full of holes. It's a crutch, that's all, and there isn't any one of us that doesn't need a crutch.
Norman Mailer
#30. Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
Norman Mailer
#31. Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
Norman Mailer
#32. The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten; the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.
Norman Mailer
#33. Where, in what cemetery of the heavens, did the tender words of lovers rest when they loved no longer?
Norman Mailer
#34. People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.
Norman Mailer
#35. One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.
Norman Mailer
#36. When an officer of the law detects a vice in himself, he knows enough to start looking for its presence in others.
Norman Mailer
#37. There remained a hole drilled through his heart.
Norman Mailer
#38. At the end of medicine is dope; at the end of life is death; at the end of man may be the Hell which arrives from the vanities of the mind.
Norman Mailer
#39. The feeling of joy came up in me again the way the lyric of a song might remind a man on the edge of insanity that soon he will be insane again and there is a world there more interesting than his own.
Norman Mailer
#40. On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
Norman Mailer
#41. The paradox is that no love can prove so intense
as the love of two narcissists for each other.
Norman Mailer
#43. Then comes the left jab again. A converted southpaw? It has something of the shift of locus which comes from making love to a brunette when she is wearing a blond wig.
Norman Mailer
#44. With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
Norman Mailer
#45. There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
Norman Mailer
#46. Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel, which consequently had to be destroyed. And then came the next shock. We had to realize that the people that did this were brilliant. It showed that the ego we could hold up until September 10 was inadequate.
Norman Mailer
#47. I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.
Norman Mailer
#48. It aroused my paranoia (which is always there in ready supply, since it is preferable to poor powers of anticipation).
Norman Mailer
#49. As the Maestro is never loath to tell us, a human who suffers from too much ambition succeeds only in exemplifying the Creator's own lack of anticipation. The D.K., wishing His Vision to be innovative, had created the human will as an instinct all but free of Him. Once again, God had miscalculated.
Norman Mailer
#50. In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.
Norman Mailer
#51. Sometimes I think our future existence will depend on whether we can keep false information from proliferating too rapidly. If our power to verify the facts does not keep pace, then distortions of information will eventually choke us.
Norman Mailer
#52. Insanity consists of building major structures upon foundations which do not exist.
Norman Mailer
#54. By the time his political career began, he was in command of an artwork of lies elaborate enough to support his smallest need. He could shave the truth by a hair or subvert it altogether.
Norman Mailer
#55. A criminal will never forgive you for preventing them from committing the crime that is really in their heart.
Norman Mailer
#56. Since great writers communicate a vision of existence, one can't borrow their methods. The method is married to the vision.
Norman Mailer
#57. It was probably a damn sight easier than getting rid of a woman who had found something in him that he didn't have or he didn't care to give.
Norman Mailer
#58. A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor ... The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.
Norman Mailer
#59. Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.
Norman Mailer
#60. I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.
Norman Mailer
#61. Even an evil man can have principles-he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy.
Norman Mailer
#62. Metaphor reveals a writer's true grasp of life. To the degree that you have no metaphor, you have not yet lived much of a life.
Norman Mailer
#63. There are these two kinds of patriotism. There's blind patriotism, unflagging patriotism. And then there's the patriotism that says I live in a democracy and it's very important for the health and the life of this democracy that it get better all the time, not get worse.
Norman Mailer
#64. We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.
Norman Mailer
#65. His decision had been made in the valley, and it lay as an iron warp in his mind. He could have turned back no more easily than he could have killed himself.
Norman Mailer
#66. Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
Norman Mailer
#67. I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress.
Norman Mailer
#68. Every time I move I squash something said Loathesome.
Norman Mailer
#69. The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.
Norman Mailer
#70. There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
Norman Mailer
#71. The fact that we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag.
Norman Mailer
#72. Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.
Norman Mailer
#73. One will feel the same subtle nausea coming into the city or waiting to depart from it that one feels now in such plastic catacombs as O'Hare's reception center in Chicago.
Norman Mailer
#76. MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience.
Norman Mailer
#77. The true religion of America has always been America.
Norman Mailer
#78. Every one of my books had killed me a little more.
Norman Mailer
#79. While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.
Norman Mailer
#80. The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture
Norman Mailer
#81. What's the use of being a writer if you can't irritate a great many people?
Norman Mailer
#82. Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
Norman Mailer
#84. Patterned after an Italian Renaissance palace, it is 88 times as large and one millionth as valuable to the continuation of man. that Pentagon of traveling salesmen.
Norman Mailer
#85. The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic's assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.
Norman Mailer
#86. The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.
Norman Mailer
#87. So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
Norman Mailer
#88. One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.
Norman Mailer
#89. Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
Norman Mailer
#90. Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
Norman Mailer
#92. I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind
Norman Mailer
#93. So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
Norman Mailer
#94. He knew that again now. Hennessey's death had opened to Croft vistas of such omnipotence that he was afraid to consider it directly. All day the fact hovered about his head, tantalizing him with odd dreams and portents of power.
Norman Mailer
#95. Alois did not know (or care that much) whether men and women had souls, but he was in no doubt about dogs. They did, and you had to be loyal to the soul of a dog.
Norman Mailer
#96. Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
Norman Mailer
#98. Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.
Norman Mailer
#99. It was better than floods of misery that a son of her flesh had killed the sons of other mothers. That burned in her heart like the pain which flared in the arthritis of her knees. Pain was a boring conversationalist who never stopped, just found new topics. Bess
Norman Mailer
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