Norman Mailer > Quotes

“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.”
― Norman Mailer

“Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”
― Norman Mailer

“Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.”
― Norman Mailer

“You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.”
― Norman Mailer

“Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.”
― Norman Mailer

“Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.”
― Norman Mailer

“You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.”
― Norman Mailer

“There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.”
― Norman Mailer

“One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.”
― Norman Mailer

“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.”
― Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself

“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. ”
― Norman Mailer

“The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.”
― Norman Mailer

“The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.”
― Norman Mailer

“The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture”
― Norman Mailer

“We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.”
― Norman Mailer, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison

“The natural role of the twentieth-century man is anxiety.”
― Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

“I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.”
― Norman Mailer

“Every one of my books had killed me a little more.”
― Norman Mailer

“I'm not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 per cent good and 35 per cent bad—that's a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 per cent good, 46 per cent bad—and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I'm 60 per cent bad and 40 per cent good—for that, must I suffer eternal punishment?

"Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There's no reason to receive a reward if you're 57/43—why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That's almost impossible to contemplate.”
― Norman Mailer, On God: An Uncommon Conversation

“Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart”
― Norman Mailer, The Gospel According to the Son

“There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night.”
― Norman Mailer

“The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.”
― Norman Mailer

“Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.”
― Norman Mailer

“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.”
― Norman Mailer

“The paradox is that no love can prove so intense
as the love of two narcissists for each other.”
― Norman Mailer

“The more things you own, the more things you need to keep you comfortable.”
― Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

“Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon”
― Norman Mailer, Harlot's Ghost

“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.”
― Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

“I guess all that's left is to love the fire.”
― Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself

“Great sex is apocalyptic. There is no such thing as great sex unless you have an apocalyptic moment.”
― Norman Mailer