Norman Mailer Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

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.

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

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

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

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

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

Alimony is the curse of the writing class.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.

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.

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.