Norman Mailer Quotes

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... view

By: Norman Mailer

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... view

By: Norman Mailer

Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts... view

By: Norman Mailer

Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men... view

By: Norman Mailer

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind... view

By: Norman Mailer

Alimony is the curse of the writing class... view

By: Norman Mailer

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined.. view

By: Norman Mailer

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation... view

By: Norman Mailer

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level... view

By: Norman Mailer

Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another... view

By: Norman Mailer

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation... view

By: Norman Mailer

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety... view

By: Norman Mailer

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... view

By: Norman Mailer

There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be... view

By: Norman Mailer

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same... view

By: Norman Mailer

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... view

By: Norman Mailer

Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it... view

By: Norman Mailer

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people... view

By: Norman Mailer

In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell... view

By: Norman Mailer

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... view

By: Norman Mailer

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment... view

By: Norman Mailer

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most... view

By: Norman Mailer

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists... view

By: Norman Mailer

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... view

By: Norman Mailer

Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor... view

By: Norman Mailer

It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions... view

By: Norman Mailer

Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child... view

By: Norman Mailer

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent... view

By: Norman Mailer

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... view

By: Norman Mailer

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist... view

By: Norman Mailer

I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses... view

By: Norman Mailer

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... view

By: Norman Mailer

I hate everything which is not in myself... view

By: Norman Mailer

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... view

By: Norman Mailer

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... view

By: Norman Mailer

Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle... view

By: Norman Mailer

The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world... view

By: Norman Mailer

It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel.. view

By: Norman Mailer

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... view

By: Norman Mailer

When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write... view

By: Norman Mailer

With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance... view

By: Norman Mailer

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing... view

By: Norman Mailer