Norman Mailer Quotes

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.

The essence of spirit ... 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.

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

I take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I've learned to alternate the two as matters develop.

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.

Armstrong, sitting in the commander's seat, spacesuit on, helmet on, plugged into electrical and environmental umbilical's, is a man who is not only a machine himself in the links of these networks, but is also a man sitting in (what Collins is later to call) a 'mini-cathedral.' a man somewhat more than a pilot, somewhat more than a superpilot, is in fact a veritable high priest of the forces of society and scientific history concentrated in that mini cathedral, a general of the church of the forces of technology.