Norman Mailer Quotations

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.

I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.

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

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

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

Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.

What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.

Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.

Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

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.

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.

With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.

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

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.

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

We can never know for certain where our prayers are likely to go, nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.

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

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

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

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.

Alimony is the curse of the writing class.

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.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

I hate everything which is not in myself.

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

In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

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

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

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

There are four stages in a marriage. First there's the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

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 is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.

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

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

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.

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Moving from one activity to another makes sense if you do it with a hint of wit or touch of grace. But I think moving from one activity to another can give momentum. If you do it well you can increase the energy you bring to the next piece of work.

He got a corporation mind. He don't believe in nature; he puts his trust and distrust in man.

To be a mainstream American is to live as an oxymoron. You are a good Christian, but you strain to remain dynamically competitive.

Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.

You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that's the highest effectiveness man has achieved.

The platitude turned on its head is still a platitude

When considering regulations, half of what is published is probably 50 % incorrect. The rest is 75 % wrong.

Is there meat in these? I'm a vegetarian.

You never really know a woman until you meet her in court

There was no one ever in American life who was remotely like Truman Capote. Small wonder, then, if people are still fascinated by him.

It is the actions of men and not their sentiments that make history. Our sentiments can be loaded with love within, but our actions can turn into the opposite. Perversity is always ready to consort with human nature.

I've had an exciting relation to France all my life, from my young years in Brooklyn when I thought that Paris was the place to be.

In my day the library was a wonderful place... We didn't have visual aids and didn't have various programs...it was a sanctuary... So I tend to think the library should remain a center of knowledge.

He bears an unmistakable resemblance to a cornered rat

The desire for success lubricates secret prostitutions in the soul

I really gave up being passionate about politics 10, 15, 20 years ago, because I think finally that there were forces in the country that are larger than politics itself. And so I find it a fascinating game, this wonderful stuff goes on in terms of watching the game. But If you get to down it, look, I`m going to root for someone, I`ll root at a football game, not for politicians.

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 condition that is most disagreeable in your life becomes the most useful one. You know, I feel the same way about the U.S. Army. It was absolutely the worst experience of my life, and it was probably the single most valuable experience.

Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.

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

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 don't read other writers because I'm writing all the time. It's too disturbing to read a writer with a good style when you're in the middle of putting your work together.

You have the right to speak your mind.

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?

I can`t get excited about politics, but I love it as a game. Because what I love in politics - this is very selfish of me, but who cares - what I do love in politics is this ability it has to make you think in new ways.

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.

God is a creator, not a law giver.

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

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.

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

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

At bottom, I mean profoundly at bottom, the FBI has nothing to do with Communism, it has nothing to do with catching criminals, it has nothing to do with the Mafia, the syndicate, it has nothing to do with trust-busting, it has nothing to do with interstate commerce, it has nothing to do with anything but serving as a church for the mediocre. A high church for the true mediocre.

A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, compromised idealism, career-advancement, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat.

We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore; we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.

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.

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

Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

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.

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

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

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

Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.

Did a sense of shame ever reside in our Republican toadies? You can't stop people who are never embarrassed by themselves. Will's readiness to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse can be cited as world class sycophancy.

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

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

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

The way you write affects what you say.

To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you.

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.

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

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

The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.

The novelist ... must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all.

...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.

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