Norman Mailer Quotes

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.

Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.

Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing

What's the use of being a writer if you can't irritate a great many people?

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.

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

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

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

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.

I don't want to retire. I'm not that good at crossword puzzles

Insanity consists of building major structures upon foundations which do not exist.

Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.

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

Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It's an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.

The way you write affects what you say.

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

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.

I guess all that's left is to love the fire.

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

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

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

Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.

It all comes down to who does the dishes.

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.

Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought.

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

Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.

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

Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.

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

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

If you can change style, why stick to one style? Style is a vanity because it gives you product identification.

So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.

While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.

The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.

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 become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.

To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.

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.

I would introduce myself if it were not useless. The name I had last night will not be the same as the name I have tonight. For the moment, then, let me say that I am thinking of Sam Slovoda.

I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes. If you're half evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person you are opposed to is totally evil.

I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.

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

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

Cancer is the growth of madness denied.

Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.

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

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.

We didn't win the Cold War, we were just a big bank that bankrupted a smaller bank because we had an arms race that wiped the Russians out.

Culture is worth a little risk.