Norman Mailer Quotes

Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.

The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.

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

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

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism.

People who live under fascism are not only miserable but they're full of shame. You just don't go in and inject democracy into them. They're half crazy with their own.

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

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery.

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.

Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.

No heart is so hard as the timid heart.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.

I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life.

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

I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.

There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.

The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.

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

Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.

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

A high church for the true mediocre.

What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?

Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.

I hate everything which is not in myself.

When I read it ["Tough Guys Don't Dance"], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.

I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind

The true religion of America has always been America.

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

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

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.

You have the right to speak your mind.

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.

Every one of my books had killed me a little more.

There are two kinds of brave men: those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will.

I usually need a can of beer to prime me.

Writing for a newspaper is like running a revolutionary war. You go to battle not when you are ready, but when action offers itself.

Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time.

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

The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture

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