Norman Mailer Quotes

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

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

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

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

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

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.

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.

...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.

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

God is a creator, not a law giver.

It all comes down to who does the dishes.

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.

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.

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

Alimony is the curse of the writing class.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.

The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high.

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

Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way. p.207

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.

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.

In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.

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'.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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