Norman Mailer Quotes:

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

Topics: Eugenics, Suffering, Levels, Higher Level

Part of living, part of becoming a wise man or a wise woman, is to get to that point where you can have a friend for whom you are genuinely happy when he or she has a success. That's tough. Very few people get to that point. With writers it's next to impossible. You can't really bless a writer who's as good as yourself.

Topics: Wise, Men, People

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

source: - "Mr. Mailer Concludes". Interview with Zachary Klein, zacharykleinonline.com. July 29, 2013.

Topics: War, Support, Reason

People who live under fascism are not only miserable but they're full of shame. You just don't go in and inject democracy into them. They're half crazy with their own...

Topics: Crazy, People, Democracy

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

source: - 1965 'Mr Mailer Interviews Himself', in the NewYork Times Book Review,17 Sep.

Topics: Book, Writing, Men, Childbearing, Book Writing

You have the right to speak your mind.

Topics: Mind, Speak, Speak Your Mind

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

source: - Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon (1988). “Conversations with Norman Mailer”, p.389, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Law, Pay, Literature, Laws Of Life

One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.

Topics: War, Fall, Loss

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

Topics: Art, Real, Character

The condition that is most disagreeable in your life becomes the most useful one. You know, I feel the same way about the U.S. Army. It was absolutely the worst experience of my life, and it was probably the single most valuable experience.

Topics: Army, Way, Worst

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

Topics: Fitness, Workout, Responsibility, Physical Fitness, Physical Exercise

I don't read other writers because I'm writing all the time. It's too disturbing to read a writer with a good style when you're in the middle of putting your work together.

Topics: Writing, Style, Together

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

Topics: Real, Bad Day, Mean

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.

Topics: New York, Book, Long, New York Times

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

Topics: Wonder, Ass, Made

Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.

Topics: Unions, Armament, Soviet Union

To blame the poor for subsisting on welfare has no justice unless we are also willing to judge every rich member of society by how productive he or she is. Taken individual by individual, it is likely that there's more idleness and abuse of government favors among the economically privileged than among the ranks of the disadvantaged.

Topics: Taken, Government, Justice, Disadvantaged

We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.

Topics: War, Democracy, Arguing

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

source: - Norman Mailer (2013). “The Deer Park: A Novel”, p.368, Random House

Topics: Wall, Pride, Blow, Wounded Pride, Non Conformity

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

Topics: Democracy, Nightmare, Ends

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

Topics: Art, People, Finals, Purpose Of Art

There are these two kinds of patriotism. There's blind patriotism, unflagging patriotism. And then there's the patriotism that says I live in a democracy and it's very important for the health and the life of this democracy that it get better all the time, not get worse.

Topics: Two, Important, Democracy, It Gets Better

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.

Topics: Baby, Children, Book, Conceiving

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

Topics: People, Trying, Emotion

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

source: - Esquire, June 1960

Topics: Forever, Stories, Literature, Newspaper Reporters, Protagonists

The great power in America is the corporations - we`re a corporate country. We`re run by a CEO and the stockholders have very little to say on how the corporation is run. Fine, the board of directors run it and the stockholders can just be disgruntled, but who gives a damn?

Topics: Running, Country, America, Board Of Directors, Disgruntled

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.

source: - "The Armies of the Night". Book by Norman Mailer, 1968.

Topics: Knowing, World, Wave, Impotence

I really gave up being passionate about politics 10, 15, 20 years ago, because I think finally that there were forces in the country that are larger than politics itself. And so I find it a fascinating game, this wonderful stuff goes on in terms of watching the game. But If you get to down it, look, I`m going to root for someone, I`ll root at a football game, not for politicians.

Topics: Country, Football, Thinking

One's condition on ***** 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.

Topics: War, Marijuana, Emptiness

God is a creator, not a law giver.

Topics: Law, Giver, Creator

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.

Topics: Freedom, Tyrants, Democracy, Undefined, Voting And Democracy

There`s a tendency for Americans, particularly the simpler you are, the more you believe in the president as the kind of person to be.

Topics: Believe, President, Kind

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.

source: - Interview with Divina Infusino, American Way Magazine, June 15, 1995.

Topics: Answers, Obsession, Coming Back

I can`t get excited about politics, but I love it as a game. Because what I love in politics - this is very selfish of me, but who cares - what I do love in politics is this ability it has to make you think in new ways.

Topics: Selfish, Thinking, Games, New Ways

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.

Topics: Secret, Mind, Literature

Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.

Topics: Lying, Each Day, Television

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

Topics: Might, Blind, Teach

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.

Topics: War, Blessing, Boredom, Funny Boredom

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

Topics: Sex, Safe

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

Topics: Angel, Men, Brutes

The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.

Topics: Soul, Secret, Desire, Desire For Success

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

Topics: Children, Hands, Giving, Grenade

Boredom slays more of existence than war.

Topics: War, Boredom, Existence

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.

Topics: Thinking, Roots, Creative

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.

Topics: Hero, Men, Vision

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.

Topics: Love, Life, Change

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

Topics: Sports, Men, Winning, Masculinity

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.

Topics: Inspiring, Thinking, Purpose, Immensity

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.

Topics: Mean, Care, Littles, Living On The Edge

Growth is a greater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth.

Topics: Successful, Men, Growth, Successful Man

A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.

Topics: War, Army, Fighting

People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

Topics: War, Military, Moving

As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery.

Topics: Fear, People, Bravery

Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.

Topics: Courage, Ambition, Men, Napoleonic

Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is thegrowth of madness denied.

Topics: Cancer, Cells, Mad

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.

Topics: Powerful, Believe, Years, Disbelievers

I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.

source: - Source: www.3ammagazine.com

Topics: Children, Real, War, Imaginary World

One will feel the same subtle nausea coming into the city or waiting to depart from it that one feels now in such plastic catacombs as O'Hare's reception center in Chicago.

Topics: Cities, Waiting, Nausea

Culture is worth a little risk,

Topics: Risk, Culture, Littles

And so I ask, "Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in his weary cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits.

Topics: God, Time, Sex, Cryptic

I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others.

Topics: Fighting, Artist, People

We're all divided souls, we've got two natures in us, You measure schizophrenia not by the fact that you're divided but how well the divisions speak to one another.

Topics: Two, Soul, Facts

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

Topics: Thinking, Waste, Wasting Time

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.

Topics: War, Winning, Race

Alimony is the curse of the writing class.

Topics: Writing, Class, Alimony

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.

Topics: Ambition, Destiny, Suffering

I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946.... We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.

Topics: Girl, Bored, Evening, Jack Kennedy, Ritz

I would introduce myself if it were not useless. The name I had last night will not be the same as the name I have tonight. For the moment, then, let me say that I am thinking of Sam Slovoda.

Topics: Night, Thinking, Names

What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it.

Topics: Athlete, Competition, Novelists, Good Athlete

Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.

Topics: Courage, Dull, Firsts

...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.

Topics: Lying, Media, Requirements

Did a sense of shame ever reside in our Republican toadies? You can't stop people who are never embarrassed by themselves. Will's readiness to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse can be cited as world class sycophancy.

Topics: Class, History, People, Toady

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

Topics: Honesty, Habit, Sturdy, Prevarication

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

Topics: Running, Law, Get Better

The White Protestant's ultimate sympathy must be with science, factology, and committee rather than with sex, birth, heat, flesh, creation, the sweet and the funky; they must vote, manipulate, control, and direct, these Protestants who are the center of power in our land, they must go for what they believe is reason when it is only the Square logic of the past.

Topics: Sweet, Sex, Believe, Funky

The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars.

Topics: Stars, War, Men

Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn't always enough.

Topics: Love Is, Men, Thinking

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

Topics: Facts, Factions, Hybrid

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

Topics: Cancer, Profit, Crisis

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

Topics: Boys, Chickens, Good Boy

When the wind carries a cry which is meaningful to human ears, it is simpler to believe the wind shares with us some part of the emotion of Being than that the mysteries of a hurricane's rising murmur reduce to no more than the random collision of insensate molecules.

Topics: Meaningful, Believe, Wind, Collision

To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder... The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.

Topics: Army, Men, Ladders

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

Topics: Design, World, Want, Dissatisfaction

Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel, which consequently had to be destroyed. And then came the next shock. We had to realize that the people that did this were brilliant. It showed that the ego we could hold up until September 10 was inadequate.

Topics: Country, America, People, Tower Of Babel, Babel

I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life.

Topics: Freedom, Feelings, Intellectual, Intellectual Freedom

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

source: - Norman Mailer (2013). “An American Dream: A Novel”, p.17, Random House

Topics: Knowledge, Heart, Journey

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

Topics: Opposites, Becoming, Matter, Polarity

Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.

Topics: Anxiety, Rewards, Courage To Love

Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.

Topics: Los Angeles, Plastic, Constellations

Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.

Topics: Ready, Ready To Die

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...

Topics: Book, Ordinary, Photograph

On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.

Topics: Winter, Years, Fog, Algonquins

I don't trust compliments. I've been getting them for years. Sometimes I deserve them, sometimes I didn't. But generally when people give you compliments there's one of two things wrong with them. Either they're false, or what's worse is they're sincere. They really mean the compliment. And then they're offering you their loyalty. And I'm kind of a stingy... Well, I don't necessarily want to give all that loyalty back. So either way, let's skip the compliments.

Topics: Loyalty, Mean, Offering, Stingy

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

Topics: Book, Writing, Wince

I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.

Topics: People, Childhood, Grace

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

source: - NORMAN MAILER (1983). “ANCIENT EVENINGS”

Topics: Cute, Cute Friendship

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

Topics: Confused, Groups, Answers, Right Answers

The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.

Topics: Looks, Mediocrity, Precedent

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

source: - "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Court, Mets, Knows

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

Topics: Wonder, Ass, Made

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

source: - Norman Mailer (2013). “The Deer Park: A Novel”, p.200, Random House

Topics: Men, Literature, Action

It's very bad to write a novel by act of will. I can do a book of nonfiction work that way - just sign the contract and do the book because, provided the topic has some meaning for me, I know I can do it. But a novel is different. A novel is more like falling in love. You don't say, 'I'm going to fall in love next Tuesday, I'm going to begin my novel.' The novel has to come to you. It has to feel just like love.

Topics: Falling In Love, Book, Love You

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.

Topics: Beautiful, Names, People

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.

source: - 1959 Advertisements for Myself,'Advertisement for "Games and Ends"'.

Topics: Stupid, Eye, White, Protestants, Serene

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.

source: - Norman Mailer (2013). “Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays”, p.195, Random House

Topics: Men, Two, Brave

Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart

source: - Norman Mailer (2013). “The Gospel According to the Son: A Novel”, p.114, Random House

Topics: Heart, Dungeons, Harsh, Harsh Words

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

Topics: Hate, Thinking, Cages

A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.

source: - Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon (1988). “Conversations with Norman Mailer”, p.88, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Character, Men, Style

For 40 years we were led to think of the Russians as godless, materialistic and an evil empire. When the Cold War ended, we suddenly discovered that Russia was a poor Third World country. They had not been equipped to take over the world. In fact, they were just trying to improve a miserable standard of oppressive living, and couldn't. They had to spend too much on arms build-up. We didn't win the Cold War; we bankrupted the Russians. In effect, it was a big bank exhausting the reserves of a smaller one.

Topics: Country, War, Winning, Exhausting

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

Topics: Kind, Jew, Asks

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

Topics: Egomaniacs, Liberalism, Incapable

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

source: - Norman Mailer (2003). “The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing”, p.134, Random House

Topics: Two, Intense, Narcissist

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

Topics: Fire, Left

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.

Topics: Smart, Hands, Novelists, Smartness

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.

source: - Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon (1988). “Conversations with Norman Mailer”, p.34, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Mean, Important, Today, Damn Things, Extermination

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

Topics: Sex, Moments, Great Sex

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.

source: - Interview in "Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Third Series" edited by George Plimpton, 1967.

Topics: Weed, War, Marijuana, Medical Marijuana, Smoking Weed

I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.

source: - "His Punch Is Better Than Ever". Interview with Bonnie Angelo, content.time.com. September 30, 1991.

Topics: Believe, Self, America

The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.

Topics: Passion, Understanding, Curiosity, Diminish, Distaste

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

source: - Norman Mailer (1968). “The idol and the octopus: political writings, on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations”

Topics: Men, Honor, Littles, Masculinity

Over the years, I've found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write.

Topics: Writing, Simple, Years, Count On Me

We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.

source: - Norman Mailer (2013). “Ancient Evenings: A Novel”, p.793, Random House

Topics: Heart, Past, Together

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

source: - 1963 The Presidential Papers, preface.

Topics: Trust, America, People, Irreverent

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

source: - 1959 Advertisements for Myself,'The Homosexual Villain'.

Topics: Alive, Homosexuality, Latent

We are close to dead. There are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium; they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.

source: - Norman Mailer (1966). “Cannibals and Christians”, Dell, 1967

Topics: Night, Civilization, Cities, Stimulants, Maggots

When you know too much information and you acquire it too easily, you tend to either use it in disagreeable ways, out of vanity, or you tend to be indiscriminate about it. I mean, in the old days, it was tricky, you had to go to various encyclopedias, you had to go to the library, maybe spend a day there, whatever. But in the end, if you found something, it was really exciting. Now you hit a couple of buttons and you get some information. Which, by the way, is almost always presented in that same goddamn mediocre style that characterizes the Internet for me. It is slightly deadening.

Topics: Couple, Mean, Vanity, Encyclopedia, Too Much Information

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

source: - "Barbary Shore". Book by Norman Mailer, 1951.

Topics: Literature, Revolution, Individual

The true religion of America has always been America.

source: - 1984 Interview in Time Out, 27 Sep-3 Oct.

Topics: America, True Religion

Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon

Topics: Light, Horizon, Lasts, Martini

The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.

Topics: Evil, Mind, Machines

We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore; we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.

source: - Norman Mailer (1968). “The idol and the octopus: political writings, on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations”

Topics: Life, Nature, Cancer, Iron Ore, Vat

Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it.

Topics: Country, Home, Grace

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.

Topics: Years, World, Ugly

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

source: - Cannibals and Christians (1966) p. 51

Topics: Emotional, Sentimental, Sentiments, Promiscuity, Sentimentality

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

Topics: People, Use, Great Men

Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.

source: - Norman Mailer (2013). “An American Dream: A Novel”, p.14, Random House

Topics: Promise, Relief, Murder

Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.

Topics: Guy, Wrong Guy, Incredibles

Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain our frail religion ... faith in the power of words.

Topics: Opportunity, Power Of Words, Frail, Khomeini

Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.

source: - NORMAN MAILER (1983). “ANCIENT EVENINGS”

Topics: Pain, Who I Am, Sound

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

source: - Norman Mailer (1967). “The Deer Park: A Play”, New York : Dell

Topics: Sex, Night, Men, Sex And Love

No heart is so hard as the timid heart.

source: - Norman Mailer (2013). “The Gospel According to the Son: A Novel”, p.65, Random House

Topics: Heart, Hard

Love is simple to understand if you haven't got a mind soft and full of holes. It's a crutch, that's all, and there isn't any one of us that doesn't need a crutch.

Topics: Love, Simple, Mind

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

Topics: Book, Writing, Married

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

source: - Norman Mailer (2007). “Harlot's Ghost: A Novel”, p.107, Random House

Topics: Death, Littles, Celebration

I'm a great believer in the hereafter, in karma, in reincarnation. It does make sense. I believe that God is not just a law-giver, but a creative artist. The greatest of all. And what characterises artists is that they want to redo their work. Maybe it didn't come off perfectly, so they want to see it done again, and improved. Reincarnation is a way for God to improve his earlier works.

Topics: Karma, Believe, Artist, Redos

We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd... Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste...? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?

source: - "Cannibals and Christians". Book by Norman Mailer, 1966.

Topics: Art, Civilization, Effort, Pop Art, Bedding

At bottom, I mean profoundly at bottom, the FBI has nothing to do with Communism, it has nothing to do with catching criminals, it has nothing to do with the Mafia, the syndicate, it has nothing to do with trust-busting, it has nothing to do with interstate commerce, it has nothing to do with anything but serving as a church for the mediocre. A high church for the true mediocre.

source: - "The Presidential Papers (The Sixth Presidential Paper - A Kennedy Miscellany: An Impolite Interview)". Book by Norman Mailer, 1963.

Topics: Mean, Mafia, Church, Interstate, Busting

Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing

source: - Norman Mailer (2013). “The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition, With a New Introduction by the Author”, p.12, Henry Holt and Company

Topics: Writing, Adjectives, Mark, Best Sellers, Sellers

I have always had this very strong, call it a feeling, call it a prejudice, call it a conviction ... that the mysteries are not easily available. You have to earn entrance into them. You didn't learn things for too little. You had to pay a price. And I felt that LSD was just blasting superhighways into the mysteries. And what I really didn't like about LSD is that people who were taking it were seeming to become less and less as they took it. They got emptier and more vapid.

Topics: Strong, People, Feelings, Vapid

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

Topics: Book, Littles

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.

source: - 1966 Cannibals and Christians, 'A Speech AtBerkeley on Vietnam Day'.

Topics: Evil, Groups, Minorities, Minority Government, Minority Groups

Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.

Topics: Block, Ego, Writer's Block

We are in love with the word. We are proud of it. The word precedes the formation of the state. The word comes to us from every avatar of early human existence. As writers, we are obliged more than others to keep our lives attached to the primitive power of the word. From India, out of the Vedas, we still hear: On the spoken word, all the gods depend, all beasts and men; in the world live all creatures...The word is the name of the divine world.

Topics: Men, Names, Vedas, Spoken Word, Human Existence

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

source: - Norman Mailer (2003). “Why are We at War?”, Random House Incorporated

Topics: Mean, Democracy, Flags

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.

source: - Norman Mailer (2013). “Tough Guys Don't Dance: A Novel”, p.27, Random House

Topics: Happiness, Cutting, Thinking, Surgeons

There are days when I'll wake up and think, oh, I've really been something. You know, it won't be the same without me. And then there are days when I wake up and I say, 'Don't kid yourself. Your contribution was minimal. You changed very little. Everything you hated prospered'.

Topics: Life, Kids, Thinking, You Changed

There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.

source: - News Summaries, December 31, 1969.

Topics: Children, Divorce, Cynical, Funny Divorce, After Divorce

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

source: - Norman Mailer (1968). “The idol and the octopus: political writings, on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations”

Topics: Suicide, Violence, Spirit

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

source: - "Dream come true: Neil Gaiman to create new Sandman 'prequel'" by Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. July 13, 2012.

Topics: Sandman, Comic, Comic Strips

Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.

Topics: Writing, Littles, Rooms

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

source: - "His Punch Is Better Than Ever". Interview with Bonnie Angelo, content.time.com. September 30, 1991.

Topics: Men, Tyrants, Political

Writing for a newspaper is like running a revolutionary war. You go to battle not when you are ready, but when action offers itself.

Topics: Running, War, Writing

To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you.

Topics: Writing, Character, Elude You

The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic's assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.

source: - norman mailer (1968). “teh armies of the night”

Topics: Stopping, Waste, Assumption

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.

source: - 1966 Cannibals and Christians,'My Hope For America'.

Topics: Freedom, America, Long, American Life

The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten; the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.

source: - Norman Mailer (1970). “Cannibals and Christians”

Topics: Wisdom, Forgotten, Politician

As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.

source: - "Why Are We at War?".

Topics: Prayer, Thinking, Devil, Assisting

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

Topics: Want, Retiring, Crosswords

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

source: - A Fire on the Moon (1970) pt. 1, ch. 2

Topics: Events, Literature, Size, Reverberation

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

Topics: Insanity, Foundation, Mental Illness

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

Topics: Risk, Culture, Beast

Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It's an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.

source: - Norman Mailer (2003). “The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing”, p.125, Random House

Topics: Writing, Damage, Desks

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

source: - Norman Mailer (2013). “Tough Guys Don't Dance: A Novel”, p.186, Random House

Topics: Inspirational, Dance, Believe

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

source: - Norman Mailer (2013). “The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition, With a New Introduction by the Author”, p.352, Henry Holt and Company

Topics: Conformity, Tick, Unimportant

I usually need a can of beer to prime me.

source: - Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon (1988). “Conversations with Norman Mailer”, p.80, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Beer, Needs, Prime

Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.

Topics: Children, Philosophy, Existentialism

Part of the oncoming demise (of New York during its terrible fiscal crisis) is that none of us can simply believe it. We were always the best and the strongest of cities, and our people were vital to the teeth. Knock them down eight times and they would get up with that look in the eye which suggests the fight has barely begun.

Topics: New York, Believe, Eye

Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic; San Francisco is a lady

source: - Norman Mailer (2016). “Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968”, p.83, Random House

Topics: New York, Cities, San Francisco, Cities In The World, Great American

Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.

source: - Norman Mailer (2013). “Tough Guys Don't Dance: A Novel”, p.30, Random House

Topics: Affliction, Sauce, Flair, Amnesia

One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.

Topics: Sex, Years, Making Love, Things I've Learned

When I read it ["Tough Guys Don't Dance"], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

source: - The New York Times, June 8, 1984.

Topics: Book, Writing, Literature, Wince

The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism.

source: - Norman Mailer's speech during the City Arts & Lectures Series at Herbst Theater in San Francisco, February 5, 2007.

Topics: Vegetarianism, Tendencies, Liberalism

A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.

Topics: Book, Novelists, Genius

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

source: - Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon (1988). “Conversations with Norman Mailer”, p.45, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Psychics, Quarantine, Existential, Nicotine, Hmmm

We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.

source: - Marilyn ch. 1 (1973)

Topics: Beautiful, Sweet, Men

To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.

source: - Norman Mailer (2007). “Harlot's Ghost: A Novel”, p.26, Random House

Topics: Women, Good Woman, Married

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

source: - "Barbary Shore". Book by Norman Mailer, 1951.

Topics: War, Preparation, Answers

The way you write affects what you say.

Topics: Writing, Way

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.

source: - 1976 The Fight.

Topics: Sports, Men, Boxing

Sex is not only a divine and beautiful activity; it's a murderous activity. People kill each other in bed. Some of the greatest crimes ever committed were committed in bed. And no weapons were used.

Topics: Beautiful, Sex, People

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

source: - Norman Mailer (1972). “Existential errands”, Signet

Topics: Motivational, Organization, Growth

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

source: - Norman Mailer (2016). “Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968”, p.218, Random House

Topics: Stars, Simple, Giving

Cancer is the growth of madness denied.

source: - Norman Mailer (2013). “An American Dream: A Novel”, p.254, Random House

Topics: Cancer, Growth, Madness

You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that's the highest effectiveness man has achieved.

source: - Norman Mailer (2013). “The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition, With a New Introduction by the Author”, p.82, Henry Holt and Company

Topics: Men, Effectiveness, You Like It

I've always felt that my relationship to the United States is analogous to a marriage. I love this country. I hate it. I get angry at it. I feel close to it. I'm charmed by it. I'm repelled by it. And it's a marriage that's gone on for let's say at least 50 years of my writing life, and in the course of that, what's happened? It's gotten worse. It's not what it used to be.

source: - "Mailer Tells a Lot. Not All, but a Lot.; His Longest Love Affair Is With the U.S." by Bernard Weinraub, www.nytimes.com. October 4, 2000.

Topics: Country, Hate, Writing, Charmed

You're gambling with something vital. Most writers get smashed egos.

Topics: Gambling, Ego

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

source: - "Mailer Tells a Lot. Not All, but a Lot.; His Longest Love Affair Is With the U.S." by Bernard Weinraub, www.nytimes.com. October 4, 2000.

Topics: Writing, Sweat, After Hours

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

source: - Norman Mailer (2003). “The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing”, p.198, Random House

Topics: People, Feelings, Literature, Deep Feeling

Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.

source: - Norman Mailer (2016). “Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968”, p.88, Random House

Topics: Blood, Cities, Chicago

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

source: - Norman Mailer (2013). “The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition, With a New Introduction by the Author”, p.282, Henry Holt and Company

Topics: Men, Anxiety, Roles