Norman Mailer Quotes & Sayings

How his hatred seethed in search of a justifiable excuse. — 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

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. — Norman Mailer

The true religion of America has always been America. — Norman Mailer

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

God is a creator, not a law giver. — Norman Mailer

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. — Norman Mailer

You know," he laughed easily, "with all the goddam drinkin' Ah've done, Ah still can't remember the taste of it unless Ah got the bottle right with me. — 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

Just as a fighter has to feel that he possesses the right to do physical damage to another man, so a writer has to be ready to take chances with his readers' lives. — Norman Mailer

Sequestered in the depths of the average pacifist - as one will invariably discover - resides a killer. That is why the person has become a pacifist in the first place. — Norman Mailer

If men could move out of infancy at half a mile an hour and get up to eighteen thousand miles an hour in one lifetime, well, who was to assume that the walls of the universe were safe from future men? — Norman Mailer

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

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

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

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. — Norman Mailer

Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate. — Norman Mailer

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

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

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

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. — Norman Mailer

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. — Norman Mailer

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

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. — Norman Mailer

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

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. — Norman Mailer

Beneath a toilet water of punctilio and restraint ... a deep smell came off Kelly, a hint of a big foul cat, carnal as the meat on a butcher's block, and something else, some whiff of the icy rot and iodine in a piece of marine nerve left to bleach on the sand. With it all was that congregated odor of the wealthy, a mood within the nose of face powder, of perfumes which leave the turpentine of a witch's curse, the taste of pennies in the mouth, a whiff of the tomb. It was all of Deborah for me. — Norman Mailer

The novelist ... must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all. — Norman Mailer

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

There remained a hole drilled through his heart. — Norman Mailer

It aroused my paranoia (which is always there in ready supply, since it is preferable to poor powers of anticipation). — Norman Mailer

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

The best they could? I don't think so." He paused as if to edit his woes and select the most telling ones. "Did you notice how they treated the officers? They slept in staterooms when we were jammed in the hold like pigs. It's to make them feel superior, a chosen group. That's the same device Hitler uses when he makes the Germans think they're superior." Roth felt as if he were on the edge of something profound. — Norman Mailer

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

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. — Norman Mailer

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. — Norman Mailer

Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get. — Norman Mailer

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

Retaining the phrases was a treacherous enterprise, however. His greatest problem these days had been boredom. Now he had discovered its loyal assistant - poor memory! — Norman Mailer

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

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. — Norman Mailer

Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to function long enough to give an opportunity to discover where the failure occurred. Most early debacles were so benighted that rocket engineers could have been forgiven for daubing the blood of a virgin goat on the orifice of the firing chamber. — Norman Mailer

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. — Norman Mailer

It all comes down to who does the dishes. — Norman Mailer

If only gravity were working, the path would be symmetrical, it is the wind resistance that produces the tragic curve. — Norman Mailer

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. — Norman Mailer

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

America has an almost obscene infatuation with itself. Has there ever been a big, powerful country that is as patriotic as America? And patriotic in the tinniest way, with so much flag waving? You'd really think we were some poor little republic, and that if one person lost his religion for one hour, the whole thing would crumble. America is the real religion in this country. — Norman Mailer

Characters in novels sometimes radiate more energy, therefore, when we don't enter their mind. It is one of the techniques a novelist acquires instinctively - don't go into your protagonist's thoughts until you have something to say about his or her inner life that is more interesting than the reader's suppositions. — Norman Mailer

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

Then comes the left jab again. A converted southpaw? It has something of the shift of locus which comes from making love to a brunette when she is wearing a blond wig. — Norman Mailer

Let the passions and cupidities and dreams and kinks and ideals and greed and hopes and foul corruptions of all men and women have their day and the world will still be better off, for there is more good than bad in the sum of us and our workings. — 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

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. — Norman Mailer

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. — Norman Mailer

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most. — Norman Mailer

Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existance in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is. — Norman Mailer

I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing. — Norman Mailer

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. — Norman Mailer

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. — Norman Mailer

Having reshaped my words with an intensity of feeling I had not known before, I could not understand why others were not overcome with my sense of life, of sex, and of sadness. — Norman Mailer

The feeling of joy came up in me again the way the lyric of a song might remind a man on the edge of insanity that soon he will be insane again and there is a world there more interesting than his own. — Norman Mailer

The natural role of the twentieth-century man is anxiety. — Norman Mailer

At the end of medicine is dope; at the end of life is death; at the end of man may be the Hell which arrives from the vanities of the mind. — Norman Mailer

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

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

Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought. — Norman Mailer

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. — Norman Mailer

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. — Norman Mailer

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

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

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. — Norman Mailer

Because our tragedy is that we diverge as countrymen further and further away from one another, like a space ship broken apart in flight which now drifts mournfully in isolated orbits, satellites to each other, planets none, communications faint. — Norman Mailer

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. — Norman Mailer

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

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

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. — Norman Mailer

Certain kinds of honor could not be lost without demanding that one consecrate oneself thereafter - no matter how unsuited and unprepared - to a life of revenge. I — Norman Mailer

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

Or, obversely, he might kill a man himself. It would be a question of throwing up his rifle, pressing the trigger, and a particular envelope of lusts and anxieties and perhaps some goodness would be quite dead. All as easy as stepping on an insect, perhaps easier ... Everything was completely out of whack, none of the joints fitted. The men had been singing in the motor pool, and there had been something nice about it, something childish and brave. And they were here on this road, a point moving along in a line in the vast neutral spaces of the jungle. And somewhere else a battle might be going on. The artillery, the small-arms fire they had been hearing constantly, might be nothing, something scattered along the front, or it might be all concentrated now in the minuscule inferno of combat. None of it matched. The night had broken them into all the isolated units that actually they were. — Norman Mailer

MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience. — Norman Mailer

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. — Norman Mailer

A democracy depends upon people getting brighter all the time. Democracies are delicate. They're not just ipso facto and just go on and on. — Norman Mailer

I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation. — Norman Mailer

I suspect Kierkegaard had just that in mind when he proposed that people had to be wary of feeling too saintly, since they could not be certain of the source of such feelings. — 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

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

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

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

And dread came back like a hoot from a bully on the street outside. — Norman Mailer

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. — Norman Mailer

The compulsive talker must go through the herculean transformation of learning to quit or must become a great monologuist. — Norman Mailer

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

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. — Norman Mailer

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

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. — Norman Mailer