Mailer Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Mailer
Mailer Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Mailer quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous 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.
— Norman Mailer
There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
— Norman Mailer
In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.
— Norman Mailer
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
— Norman Mailer
In the South of Spain, one could look to vice as quickly as to virtue for a sense of tradition.
— Norman Mailer
Love was here today and left us dry did we deserve Him?
— Norman Mailer
There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York. (on Tom Wolfe) — Norman Mailer
The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism.
— Norman Mailer
So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
— Norman Mailer
Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
— Norman Mailer
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.
— Norman Mailer
I don't hate women, but I think they should be kept in cages.
— Norman Mailer
The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
— Norman Mailer
You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
— Norman Mailer
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
I start with the idea of constructing a treehouse and end up with a skyscraper made of wood.
— Norman Mailer
People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
— Norman Mailer
Hemingway and Norman Mailer might have disagreed, but there is no heavyweight champion of literature.
— Tom Robbins
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
Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought.
— Norman Mailer
The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.
— Norman Mailer
Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
— Norman Mailer
Amateurs ... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.
— Norman Mailer
For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself. — Norman Mailer
When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.
— Norman Mailer
Well, I bought a ticket to the circus. I don't know why I was surprised to see elephants.
— Norris Church Mailer
I HATE EVERYTHING WHICH IS NOT IN MYSELF
— Norman Mailer
That was how the tears went down Cherry's face ... a teaspoon full of ten years' sorrow.
— 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.
— Norman Mailer
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
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.
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
— Norman Mailer
What enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers - there are only questions.
— Norman Mailer
Repetition kills the soul.
— Norman Mailer
Every time I move I squash something said Loathesome.
— 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.
— Norman Mailer
Where, in what cemetery of the heavens, did the tender words of lovers rest when they loved no longer?
— Norman Mailer
It is easy to comprehend people who are weaker than ourselves, but it is not as simple to be ready for the true feelings of those more powerful.
— Norman Mailer
The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
— Norman Mailer
Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body - it just wears it out.
— Norman Mailer
I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.
— Norman Mailer
The true religion of America has always been America.
— Norman Mailer
The Anti-Semiten. Why don't they ever learn? Why does God permit it?" Roth sneered. "God is a luxury I don't give myself.
— Norman Mailer
I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
— Norman Mailer
The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.
— Norman Mailer
There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.
— Norman Mailer
Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
— Norman Mailer
It takes all kinds to make a world.
— Norman Mailer
To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.
— Norman Mailer
Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
— Norman Mailer
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
So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
— Norman Mailer
You have the right to speak your mind.
— Norman Mailer
How his hatred seethed in search of a justifiable excuse.
— Norman Mailer
Freaks can be a fount of information.
— Norman Mailer
You let everything stand until it's knocked over and then you go over and write your own ruins
— Norman Mailer
It aroused my paranoia (which is always there in ready supply, since it is preferable to poor powers of anticipation).
— Norman Mailer
I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
— Norman Mailer
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
— Norman Mailer
The natural role of the twentieth-century man is anxiety.
— Norman Mailer
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
Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
— Norman Mailer
Men who work at Time have a life expectancy which is not long said the young man from Newsweek
— Norman Mailer
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.
— Norman Mailer
Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.
— Norman Mailer
My high-school papers, my college-application essays, read like Norman Mailer packed in a crunchy-peanut-butter sandwich.
— James Wolcott
A high church for the true mediocre.
— Norman Mailer
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
We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.
— Norman Mailer
When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.
— Norman Mailer
Only boring people get bored. Life may be tedius, but not if you brought a book.
— Robert Mailer Anderson
Don't bug me or I'll gas you said the creep
— Norman Mailer
Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
— Norman Mailer
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
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
Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.
— Susan Sontag
I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
— Norman Mailer