Norman Mailer Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Boredom slays more of existence than war.

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.

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.

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.

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

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

The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.

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.

The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.

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.

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.

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.

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?

The way you write affects what you say.

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.

Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart

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

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.

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.

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

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

You have the right to speak your mind.

When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.

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

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.

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

No heart is so hard as the timid heart.

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

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.

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

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

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.

I hate everything which is not in myself.

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.

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.

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

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

Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be."... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.

The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.