Top 100 Mailer Quotes
#1. Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes.
Susan Sontag
#2. When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#3. Pablo Picasso, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Mel Gibson, Lou Reed, Norman Mailer, Vanessa Redgrave, Van Morrison - each is distinguished by controversies unrelated to his or her art; by many accounts, some of them are not nice people at all.
Steve Erickson
#4. Mailer's Law: A thing either gets better or it costs more to run it the way it was.
Norman Mailer
#5. Hemingway and Norman Mailer might have disagreed, but there is no heavyweight champion of literature.
Tom Robbins
#6. It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don't catch him in a defensive position, he'll admit it. I'd really like to help that man.
Germaine Greer
#7. [Norman Mailer] is against masturbation, he's against homosexuality. He believes that murder is essentially sexual. I think he's rather an anthology of all the darkest American traits.
Gore Vidal
#8. Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing.
Ken Kesey
#9. What does this mean 'mailer daemon'? Satan, are you messing with the e-mail system already?
Herbert Jay Stern
#10. My high-school papers, my college-application essays, read like Norman Mailer packed in a crunchy-peanut-butter sandwich.
James Wolcott
#11. Norman Mailer enhances the beauty of pugilism by elegantly exploring it.
Davis Miller
#12. When interviewing for a job, tell the editor how you love to report. How your passion is gathering information. Do not mention how you want to be a writer, use the word 'prose,' or that deep down you have a sinking suspicion you are the next Norman Mailer.
Michael Hastings
#13. You want to make it to the top? There is no top. However high you climb, there is always somebody above you. Mailer wanted to be Hemingway, Hemingway wanted to be Joyce, and Joyce was painfully aware he'd never be another Shakespeare.
William Deresiewicz
#14. In fiction, there happens to be a long history of creative engagement with marginality, with the very human components of society that others don't want to think about, from writers such as Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud to Genet and Sarrazin and right on up to Norman Mailer.
Rachel Kushner
#15. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation. - NORMAN MAILER
Kevin Fedarko
#16. So, you're the man who can't spell 'fuck.'"
Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, 'fug,' in his 1948 book, "The Naked and the Dead.
Dorothy Parker
#17. I loved Woody Allen's short pieces. I was equally influenced by Woody Allen and Norman Mailer. I was very into this idea of being high-low, of being serious and intellectual but also making really broad jokes.
Meghan Daum
#18. Somebody like Mailer brings to that role everything that he stands for. The types of characters that I gravitate towards, the types of icons, tend to have a heavy physicality in that way.
Matthew Barney
#19. How wonderful it was to sit on a set with Norman Mailer and get to know him.
Frances Fisher
#20. To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do - that's what I mean to do.
Maya Angelou
#21. What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.'
James Wolcott
#22. I've always been a fan of books that create an interesting blend of fact and fiction - whether it's Norman Mailer, or 'The Short Timers,' or 'In Cold Blood.' I'm a fan of that genre.
Mark Boal
#23. How could you not love Norman Mailer? He was a total chauvinist, but also so vulnerable.
Gloria Steinem
#24. Norman Mailer decocts matters of the first philosophical magnitude from an examination of his own ordure, and I am not talking about his books.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#25. The whole book experience was a look into another world, the world of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.
Jerry Kramer
#26. Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.
Susan Sontag
#27. I acknowledge the right of the authorities and the press to satisfy themselves as to whether I am the anthrax mailer. This does not, however, give them the right to smear me and gratuitously make a wasteland of my life in the process. I will not be railroaded.
Steven Hatfill
#28. It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer's life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.
Dick Cavett
#29. I once looked like Norman Mailer in a picture with bad lighting.
Danielle Steel
#30. I read Mailer's Ancient Evenings with great interest because I was interested in ... the seven souls structure, which was very helpful to me in Western Lands. And also in Place of Dead Roads. So that's Mailer.
William S. Burroughs
#31. There are major writers who have written books [based on my research]. If one looks carefully at the copyright page, you'll see my name. Writers of the stature of Mailer and even bigger. All over the world.
Lawrence Schiller
#32. Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
Norman Mailer
#33. Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon
Norman Mailer
#34. Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.
Norman Mailer
#35. 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
#36. You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
Norman Mailer
#37. 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
#39. The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
Norman Mailer
#40. And so I ask, "Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in his weary cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits.
Norman Mailer
#41. Rip the prisons
open
put the
convicts
on
television
Norman Mailer
#42. To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder ... The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.
Norman Mailer
#43. Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
Norman Mailer
#44. The compulsive talker must go through the herculean transformation of learning to quit or must become a great monologuist.
Norman Mailer
#45. 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
#46. You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that's the highest effectiveness man has achieved.
Norman Mailer
#47. 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
#48. Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree.
Norman Mailer
#49. We're all divided souls, we've got two natures in us, You measure schizophrenia not by the fact that you're divided but how well the divisions speak to one another.
Norman Mailer
#50. 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
#51. The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
Norman Mailer
#52. There are four stages in a marriage. First there's the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
Norman Mailer
#53. I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
Norman Mailer
#54. Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
Norman Mailer
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.
Norman Mailer
#58. I could not begin to mourn Deborah or my mind would ride off with me. There was nothing so delicate in all the world as one's last touch of control.
Norman Mailer
#59. American's capacity for real estate improvement; build yourself a house, grow fat in it, and die.
Norman Mailer
#60. The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high.
Norman Mailer
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is thegrowth of madness denied.
Norman Mailer
#64. Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn't always enough.
Norman Mailer
#65. The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
Norman Mailer
#66. Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
Norman Mailer
#67. The moments like these, the passing doubts, were the temptations that caught you if you were not careful.
Norman Mailer
#68. The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.
Norman Mailer
#69. Men who work at Time have a life expectancy which is not long said the young man from Newsweek
Norman Mailer
#70. City Point is so beautiful, she says. In the night they cannot see the garbage that litters the beach, the seaweed and driftwood, the condoms that wallow sluggishly on the foam's edge, discarded on the shore like the minuscule loathsome animals of the sea. Yeah, it's something, he says slowly.
Norman Mailer
#71. That was how the tears went down Cherry's face ... a teaspoon full of ten years' sorrow.
Norman Mailer
#72. I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others.
Norman Mailer
#73. 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
#74. Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
Norman Mailer
#75. God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.
Norman Mailer
#77. There are many churches in my name and in the name of my apostles. The greatest and holiest is named after Peter; it is a place of great splendor in Rome. Nowhere can be found more gold.
Norman Mailer
#78. Let every
writer
tell his
own
lies
That's freedom
of the
press.
Norman Mailer
#79. We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.
Norman Mailer
#80. The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism.
Norman Mailer
#81. Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.
Norman Mailer
#82. Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get.
Norman Mailer
#83. I cannot bear that chirpy Bobby Kennedy, always building his beaver's nest with a few more facts. He needs to look into the abyss.
Norman Mailer
#84. 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
#85. Angels often flee from people who scream too loudly - they know at such moments how close the man or woman is to us, and they feel outnumbered. For devils rush in to attend such outcries.
Norman Mailer
#87. In every death is a celebration; in every ecstasy, one little death.
Norman Mailer
#88. In my day the library was a wonderful place ... We didn't have visual aids and didn't have various programs ... it was a sanctuary ... So I tend to think the library should remain a center of knowledge.
Norman Mailer
#89. Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
Norman Mailer
#90. Amateurs ... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.
Norman Mailer
#91. Since the sum of her experience had told her that the majority of one's prayers to God were not answered, she prayed now directly to us, she called upon the Devil, she implored him.
Norman Mailer
#92. I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
Norman Mailer
#93. There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night.
Norman Mailer
#94. The Waldorf looked like one of the dead and empty spaces which collect about the exit of a man who has lost a million in an hour.
Norman Mailer
#95. I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
Norman Mailer
#96. Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
Norman Mailer
#97. The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
Norman Mailer
#98. 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
#99. Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way.
p.207
Norman Mailer
#100. 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
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