Norman Mailer Literature Quotations

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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