Norman Mailer Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Norman Mailer on Wise Famous Quotes.
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.
What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.
The compulsive talker must go through the herculean transformation of learning to quit or must become a great monologuist.
I could not begin to mourn Deborah or my mind would ride off with me. There was nothing so delicate in all the world as one's last touch of control.
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 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.
It was probably a damn sight easier than getting rid of a woman who had found something in him that he didn't have or he didn't care to give.
The fact that we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag.
I did like Robert Vavra's book not only for its so very good photographs but for the text as well. He's no ordinary fellow, obviously ...
For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be
prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself.
prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself.
It was getting to be the best conversation she ever had. She had always thought the only way to have conversations like that was in your head. Then
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.
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
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.
At the end of medicine is dope; at the end of life is death; at the end of man may be the Hell which arrives from the vanities of the mind.
A criminal will never forgive you for preventing them from committing the crime that is really in their heart.
Yeah, fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap.
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.
The moments like these, the passing doubts, were the temptations that caught you if you were not careful.
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.
The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
Great sex is apocalyptic. There is no such thing as great sex unless you have an apocalyptic moment.
The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
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.
Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
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.
I cannot bear that chirpy Bobby Kennedy, always building his beaver's nest with a few more facts. He needs to look into the abyss.
Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.
The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.
So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.
So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
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.
When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.
Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
Amateurs ... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.
What enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers - there are only questions.
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.
Where, in what cemetery of the heavens, did the tender words of lovers rest when they loved no longer?
Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body - it just wears it out.
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
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.