Mailer Quotes & Sayings

Never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile. — 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

I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress. — Norman Mailer

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

Historical, religious, and existential treatises suggest that for some persons at some times, it is rational not to avoid physical death at all costs. Indeed the spark of humanity can maximize its essence by choosing an alternative that preserves the greatest dignity and some tranquility of mind. — 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

Amateurs ... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether. — 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

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

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

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

There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy--Normal mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers--that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch. You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you. — William Zinsser

Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing. — Ken Kesey

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do - that's what I mean to do. — Maya Angelou

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

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 — Norman Mailer

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

The book was sloppily written in many parts (the words came too quickly and too easily) and there was hardly a noun in any sentence that was not holding hands with the nearest and most commonly available adjective - scalding coffee and tremulous fear are the sorts of thing you will find throughout. Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing. — 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 whole book experience was a look into another world, the world of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer. — Jerry Kramer

More sensitive than others in the beginning, we have to develop the will, the stamina, the determination, and the insensitivity to take critical abuse. A good writer, therefore, does well to see himself as a strong, weak person, full of brave timidity, sensitive and insensitive. — Norman Mailer

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. — Norman Mailer

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

So, you're the man who can't spell 'fuck.'"
Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, 'fug,' in his 1948 book, "The Naked and the Dead. — Dorothy Parker

The more things you own, the more things you need to keep you comfortable. — Norman Mailer

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

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. — Norman Mailer

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

I think too much is known about me already. I think biographical information can get in the way of the reading experience. The interchange between the reader and the work. For example, I know far too much about Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. Because I know as much as I do about their personal lives, I can't read their work without this interjecting itself. So if I had it to do over, I'd probably go the way of J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. And just stay out of it altogether and let all the focus be on the work itself and not on me. — Tom Robbins

Piety can also serve as a wall to keep the pious from recognizing how profoundly angry they are at God - this God who has failed to treat them by what they see as their proper right. — Norman Mailer

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. — Norman Mailer

How wonderful it was to sit on a set with Norman Mailer and get to know him. — Frances Fisher

It is not uncommon for fighters' camps to be gloomy. In heavy training, fighters live in dimensions of boredom others do not begin to contemplate. Fighters are supposed to. The boredom creates an impatience with one's life, and a violence to improve it. Boredom creates a detestation for losing. — 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

I like the hip writers: Fitzgerald, the guy who committed suicide, Hemingway, all those guys. Some of them were alcoholics and drug addicts but they had fun. They were real people. They formed the culture of American literature. Hemingway admired Tolstoy, Tolstoy admired Pushkin, and Mailer admired Hemingway. It all flows down. The greats are all connected. One day I'm gonna write a book myself. The first chapter will be about what a rough deal my momma got. She believed in you guys and your society. — Mike Tyson

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. — Norman Mailer

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. — 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

For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be
prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself. — 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

Red had a deep loathing of the night before them. He had been through so much combat, had felt so many kinds of terror, and had seen so many men killed that he no longer had any illusions about the inviolability of his own flesh. He knew he could be killed; it was something he had accepted long ago, and he had grown a shell about that knowledge so that he rarely thought of anything further ahead than the next few minutes ... — 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

I once looked like Norman Mailer in a picture with bad lighting. — Danielle Steel

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

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

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. — 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

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

Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes. — Susan Sontag

Everything was damp and rife and hot as though the jungle were an immense collection of oily rags growing hotter and hotter under the dark stifling vaults of a huge warehouse. Heat licked at everything, and the foliage, responding, grew to prodigious sizes. In the depths, in the heat and the moisture, it was never silent. The birds cawed, the small animals and occasional snakes rustled and squealed, and beneath it all was a hush, almost palpable, in which could be heard the rapt absorbed sounds of vegetation growing. — Norman Mailer

I'm not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 per cent good and 35 per cent bad - that's a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 per cent good, 46 per cent bad - and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I'm 60 per cent bad and 40 per cent good - for that, must I suffer eternal punishment?
Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There's no reason to receive a reward if you're 57/43 - why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That's almost impossible to contemplate. — 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 fact that we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag. — Norman Mailer

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

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. — Norman Mailer

I usually need a can of beer to prime me. — 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 essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical. — Norman Mailer

Oh , kinda playing things by ear — Norman Mailer

What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.' — James Wolcott

But when the call came from Shirley Pedler to help in organizing the Utah Coalition Against the Death Penalty, she knew she would go out in the world again with her freaky blond hair, blond to everyone's disbelief - at the age of fifty-four, go out in her denims and chin-length-hanging-down-straight vanilla hair to that Salt Lake world where nobody would ever make the mistake of thinking she was a native Utah lady inasmuch as Utah was the Beehive State. The girls went big for vertical hair-dos, pure monuments to shellac. — Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer described the desire to be cool as a decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention. — Anthony Bourdain

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

The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent. — 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

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? — 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

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. — Norman Mailer

You've seen too many movies. If you're holding a gun and you shoot a defenseless man, then you're a poor creature, a dastardly person. That's a perfectly ridiculous idea, you realize. The fact that you're holding the gun and the other man is not is no accident. It's a product of everything you've achieved, it assumes that if you're ... you're aware enough, you have the gun when you need it. — Norman Mailer

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again. — Norman Mailer

You do not really wish to hear more of the Battle of Kadesh. Let me say only that human fat, gorged in considerable quantity, has an intoxicating effect. I became ... drunk. — Norman Mailer

I wonder, said the Lord I wonder if I know the answer any more. — Norman Mailer

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

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. — Norman Mailer

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. — Norman Mailer

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

There are major writers who have written books [based on my research]. If one looks carefully at the copyright page, you'll see my name. Writers of the stature of Mailer and even bigger. All over the world. — Lawrence Schiller

I HATE EVERYTHING WHICH IS NOT IN MYSELF — Norman Mailer

I find it's more fun to write about something that you don't know completely and that you will discover on route. A dear friend of mine ... once said: 'The only time I know anything is when it comes to me at the point of my pen.' So I think that if you start to write about things that you know half well, that you're fascinated by, that you sense you have an appreciation of that others might not have, but you do have to acquire the knowledge as you go, you discover a great many things at the point of a pen. And it keeps the writing alive in itself in a way.
(in an interview with Martin Amis, 1991, see YouTube) — Norman Mailer

It takes all kinds to make a world. — Norman Mailer

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. — Norman Mailer

Love was here today and left us dry did we deserve Him? — Norman Mailer

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. — Norman Mailer

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

There are many churches in my name and in the name of my apostles. The greatest and holiest is named after Peter; it is a place of great splendor in Rome. Nowhere can be found more gold. — Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer decocts matters of the first philosophical magnitude from an examination of his own ordure, and I am not talking about his books. — William F. Buckley Jr.

The way you write affects what you say. — 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

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. — 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

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

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

A criminal will never forgive you for preventing them from committing the crime that is really in their heart. — Norman Mailer

It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his throng and his security. If such a nonentity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe that is absurd. — Norman Mailer