Top 100 Mailer Quotes
#1. Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
Norman Mailer
#2. Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon
Norman Mailer
#3. Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.
Norman Mailer
#4. 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
#5. You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
Norman Mailer
#6. 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
#8. The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
Norman Mailer
#9. 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
#10. Rip the prisons
open
put the
convicts
on
television
Norman Mailer
#11. 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
#12. Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
Norman Mailer
#13. The compulsive talker must go through the herculean transformation of learning to quit or must become a great monologuist.
Norman Mailer
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree.
Norman Mailer
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
Norman Mailer
#22. 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
#23. I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
Norman Mailer
#24. 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
#25. Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
Norman Mailer
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.
Norman Mailer
#29. 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
#30. American's capacity for real estate improvement; build yourself a house, grow fat in it, and die.
Norman Mailer
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
Norman Mailer
#37. Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
Norman Mailer
#38. The moments like these, the passing doubts, were the temptations that caught you if you were not careful.
Norman Mailer
#39. The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.
Norman Mailer
#40. Men who work at Time have a life expectancy which is not long said the young man from Newsweek
Norman Mailer
#41. 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
#42. That was how the tears went down Cherry's face ... a teaspoon full of ten years' sorrow.
Norman Mailer
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
Norman Mailer
#46. 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
#48. 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
#49. Let every
writer
tell his
own
lies
That's freedom
of the
press.
Norman Mailer
#50. We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.
Norman Mailer
#51. The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism.
Norman Mailer
#52. Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.
Norman Mailer
#53. Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get.
Norman Mailer
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#58. In every death is a celebration; in every ecstasy, one little death.
Norman Mailer
#59. 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
#60. Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
Norman Mailer
#61. Amateurs ... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.
Norman Mailer
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night.
Norman Mailer
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
Norman Mailer
#68. The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
Norman Mailer
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. The old line 'You deserve someone better than me' in this case was not just an old line. She deserved someone who would love her and take care of her and he knew he never would.
Norris Church Mailer
#73. Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.
Norman Mailer
#74. 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
#75. The jeep would round the bend, be hit by a dozen bullets at once, and that would be the end of his petty history of unfocused groping and unimportant dissatisfactions.
Norman Mailer
#77. People who live under fascism are not only miserable but they're full of shame. You just don't go in and inject democracy into them. They're half crazy with their own ...
Norman Mailer
#78. Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.
Norman Mailer
#79. When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
Norman Mailer
#80. 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
#81. I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans ... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.
Norman Mailer
#82. 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
#83. The indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
Norman Mailer
#85. We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.
Norman Mailer
#86. 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
#87. Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.
Norman Mailer
#88. When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.
Norman Mailer
#89. Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Norman Mailer
#90. Mailer's Law: A thing either gets better or it costs more to run it the way it was.
Norman Mailer
#91. The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
Norman Mailer
#92. And dread came back like a hoot from a bully on the street outside.
Norman Mailer
#94. Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
Norman Mailer
#95. There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.
Norman Mailer
#96. No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.
Norman Mailer
#98. Hemingway and Norman Mailer might have disagreed, but there is no heavyweight champion of literature.
Tom Robbins
#99. You let everything stand until it's knocked over and then you go over and write your own ruins
Norman Mailer
#100. The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
Norman Mailer
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