Mailer's Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Mailer's

Mailer's Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Mailer's 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 no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you. — Norman Mailer

There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be. — Norman Mailer

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

Writer's block is only a failure of the ego. — 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

People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much. — Norman Mailer

The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder. — 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

Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth. — Norman Mailer

There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night. — Norman Mailer

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

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

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

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

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

The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism. — Norman Mailer

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

The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian. — Norman Mailer

Hemingway and Norman Mailer might have disagreed, but there is no heavyweight champion of literature. — Tom Robbins

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

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment. — Norman Mailer

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

Let every
writer
tell his
own
lies
That's freedom
of the
press. — 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. — Norman Mailer

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

There's nothing glorious about being a professional ... Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day. — Norman Mailer

Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time. — 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. — Norman Mailer

I guess all that's left is to love the fire. — Norman Mailer

It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway. — Norman Mailer

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

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

The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled. — 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. — Norman Mailer

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

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

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

That was how the tears went down Cherry's face ... a teaspoon full of ten years' sorrow. — 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

It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions. — Norman Mailer

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

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

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

What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex? — Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer enhances the beauty of pugilism by elegantly exploring it. — Davis Miller

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

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

The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul. — 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. — 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

Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day. — 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

Mailer's Law: A thing either gets better or it costs more to run it the way it was. — 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 more things you own, the more things you need to keep you comfortable. — 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