Norman Mailer Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.

The paradox is that no love can prove so intense as the love of two narcissists for each other.

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.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

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

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.

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.

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

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

You don’t know a woman until you’ve met her in court.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

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.

It’s not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.

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

I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.

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

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

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.

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

I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind

Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.

In every death is a celebration; in every ecstasy, one little death.

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.

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

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.

We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.

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.

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.

Alimony is the curse of the writing class.

If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.

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.

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

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

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.