Top 100 Mailer's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Mailer's Law: A thing either gets better or it costs more to run it the way it was.
Norman Mailer
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. When the wind carries a cry which is meaningful to human ears, it is simpler to believe the wind shares with us some part of the emotion of Being than that the mysteries of a hurricane's rising murmur reduce to no more than the random collision of insensate molecules.
Norman Mailer
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. It is not uncommon for fighters' camps to be gloomy. In heavy training, fighters live in dimensions of boredom others do not begin to contemplate. Fighters are supposed to. The boredom creates an impatience with one's life, and a violence to improve it. Boredom creates a detestation for losing.
Norman Mailer
#10. Did a sense of shame ever reside in our Republican toadies? You can't stop people who are never embarrassed by themselves. Will's readiness to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse can be cited as world class sycophancy.
Norman Mailer
#11. The condition that is most disagreeable in your life becomes the most useful one. You know, I feel the same way about the U.S. Army. It was absolutely the worst experience of my life, and it was probably the single most valuable experience.
Norman Mailer
#12. 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
#13. I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
Norman Mailer
#14. I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
Norman Mailer
#15. So long as you use a knife, there's some love left.
Norman Mailer
#16. What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it.
Norman Mailer
#17. [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
#18. There's nothing glorious about being a professional ... Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.
Norman Mailer
#19. 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
#20. It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
Norman Mailer
#21. 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
#22. You let everything stand until it's knocked over and then you go over and write your own ruins
Norman Mailer
#23. When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.
Norman Mailer
#25. 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
#26. There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night.
Norman Mailer
#27. I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.
Norman Mailer
#28. Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time.
Norman Mailer
#29. I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.
Norman Mailer
#30. I did like Robert Vavra's book not only for its so very good photographs but for the text as well. He's no ordinary fellow, obviously ...
Norman Mailer
#31. 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
#32. There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
Norman Mailer
#33. 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
#34. You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
Norman Mailer
#35. 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
#36. It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.
Norman Mailer
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. What's the use of being a writer if you can't irritate a great many people?
Norman Mailer
#40. 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
#41. I won't stay in
with married men
any more
said the wise girl
they're too agreeable,
it's a little too much
like curling
up
with the good book.
You mean
a
good book
Oh, dear,
did I say
the
good book
sighed the witch.
Norman Mailer
#42. I take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I've learned to alternate the two as matters develop.
Norman Mailer
#43. There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.
Norman Mailer
#44. 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
#45. Sex is not only a divine and beautiful activity; it's a murderous activity. People kill each other in bed. Some of the greatest crimes ever committed were committed in bed. And no weapons were used.
Norman Mailer
#46. I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.
Norman Mailer
#47. Hearn's death was happily smudged, or at least on the surface, but ever since the second ambush he had been feeling the apprehension of a man in a dream who knows he is guilty, is waiting for his punishment, and cannot remember his crime.
Norman Mailer
#48. The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.
Norman Mailer
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
Norman Mailer
#53. 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
#54. I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
Norman Mailer
#55. 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
#56. The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
Norman Mailer
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree.
Norman Mailer
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. The compulsive talker must go through the herculean transformation of learning to quit or must become a great monologuist.
Norman Mailer
#65. Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
Norman Mailer
#66. 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
#67. Rip the prisons
open
put the
convicts
on
television
Norman Mailer
#68. 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
#69. The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
Norman Mailer
#71. 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
#72. You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
Norman Mailer
#73. 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
#74. Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.
Norman Mailer
#75. Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon
Norman Mailer
#76. Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
Norman Mailer
#77. Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
Norman Mailer
#78. 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
#79. Let every
writer
tell his
own
lies
That's freedom
of the
press.
Norman Mailer
#81. Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
Norman Mailer
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. That was how the tears went down Cherry's face ... a teaspoon full of ten years' sorrow.
Norman Mailer
#85. 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
#86. Men who work at Time have a life expectancy which is not long said the young man from Newsweek
Norman Mailer
#87. The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.
Norman Mailer
#88. The moments like these, the passing doubts, were the temptations that caught you if you were not careful.
Norman Mailer
#89. 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
#90. The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
Norman Mailer
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. American's capacity for real estate improvement; build yourself a house, grow fat in it, and die.
Norman Mailer
#97. 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
#98. Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.
Norman Mailer
#99. 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
#100. 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
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