Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable.

What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.

Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.

It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.

The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.

There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position.

Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.