Norman Mailer Quotes (67 Quotes)

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.

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

The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

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

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

You never really know a woman until you meet her in court

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

The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution's in the soul.

In my day the library was a wonderful place... We didn't have visual aids and didn't have various programs...it was a sanctuary... So I tend to think the library should remain a center of knowledge.

It is the actions of men and not their sentiments that make history. Our sentiments can be loaded with love within, but our actions can turn into the opposite. Perversity is always ready to consort with human nature.

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

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.

There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.

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.

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

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

I hate everything which is not in myself.

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it.

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

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

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.

Patterned after an Italian Renaissance palace, it is 88 times as large and one millionth as valuable to the continuation of man. that Pentagon of traveling salesmen.

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.

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

A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat.

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

somewhere between crime and art.

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

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

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

One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness -- the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.

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.

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.

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

The platitude turned on its head is still a platitude

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.

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.

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

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

I've had an exciting relation to France all my life, from my young years in Brooklyn when I thought that Paris was the place to be.

New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington wink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St. Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

When considering regulations, half of what is published is probably 50 incorrect. The rest is 75 wrong.