Norman Mailer quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Norman Mailer on Wise Famous Quotes.

There remained a hole drilled through his heart.

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.

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

So long as you use a knife, there's some love left.

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

What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.

Goldstein, you'd be a pretty good boy if you wasn't so chicken.

Love was here today and left us dry did we deserve Him?

The compulsive talker must go through the herculean transformation of learning to quit or must become a great monologuist.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart

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.

The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.

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.

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.

I've made an ass of myself so many times I often wonder if I am one.

Writing a novel is the closest thing a male writer will ever get to the experience of childbirth.

Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree.

I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.

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.

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.

Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.

It all comes down to who does the dishes.

The fact that we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag.

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 ...

For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be
prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself.

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

Insanity consists of building major structures upon foundations which do not exist.

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.

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

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.

The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture

American's capacity for real estate improvement; build yourself a house, grow fat in it, and die.

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

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.

I don't want to retire. I'm not that good at crossword puzzles

Every one of my books had killed me a little more.

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

Boredom slays more of existence than war.

A criminal will never forgive you for preventing them from committing the crime that is really in their heart.

Yeah, fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap.

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.

The moments like these, the passing doubts, were the temptations that caught you if you were not careful.

God is a creator, not a law giver.

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.

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

No heart is so hard as the timid heart.

Great sex is apocalyptic. There is no such thing as great sex unless you have an apocalyptic moment.

I HATE EVERYTHING WHICH IS NOT IN MYSELF

The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.

Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.

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

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.

Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.

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.

A high church for the true mediocre.

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.

When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.

Mailer's Law: A thing either gets better or it costs more to run it the way it was.

Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.

The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.

I usually need a can of beer to prime me.

So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.

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

I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.

What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?

The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.

There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.

It takes all kinds to make a world.

What's the use of being a writer if you can't irritate a great many people?

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

So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.

The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.

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.

The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism.

When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.

Freaks can be a fount of information.

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

There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.

Amateurs ... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.

What enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers - there are only questions.

Repetition kills the soul.

Every time I move I squash something said Loathesome.

Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.

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.

Where, in what cemetery of the heavens, did the tender words of lovers rest when they loved no longer?

Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.

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

Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body - it just wears it out.

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

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.

There are two kinds of brave men: those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will.

I don't hate women, but I think they should be kept in cages.

Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence.

You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.

I start with the idea of constructing a treehouse and end up with a skyscraper made of wood.

Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought.

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.