Norman Mailer (1923–2007,) fully Norman Kingsley Mailer, was an American novelist and essayist. He is best known for using “New Journalism,” combining the imaginative subjectivity of literature with journalism’s more objective qualities. His fiction and nonfiction critically assessed the totalitarianism he claimed in the centralized authority system in 20th- and 21st-century America.
Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, Mailer was brought up in Brooklyn, educated at Harvard University, and served in the Pacific during World War II. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948,) an anti-war blast and social satire, became a bestseller, establishing him as a leading novelist of his generation. He maintained his antagonism towards contemporary society in Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955.) This period’s writing documents his progression from liberal socialism to anarchistic libertarianism.
Mailer was a proponent of the ‘New Journalism,’ using novel-writing techniques to portray real people and events. As a polemicist, campaigner, and protester, he was prominent throughout the 1960s, publishing An American Dream (1965,) Why are We in Vietnam? (1967,) and Armies of the Night (1968; National Book award; Pulitzer.) Mailer’s subsequent books include The Executioner’s Song (1979; Pulitzer,) Ancient Evenings (1983,) Harlot’s Ghost (1991,) an account of the CIA from the end of World War II to the assassination of President John F Kennedy, The Spooky Art (2003,) a book about writing, and the novel The Castle in the Forest (2007.)
Mailer published two biographical works, Oswald’s Tale (1995)—a study of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s assassin—and Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man (1995.) He has also been engaged as a screenwriter, film director, and actor, with such works as Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987; based on his 1984 thriller.)
Mailer’s notable biographies include Mary V Dearborn’s Mailer: A Biography (1999) and J. Michael Lennon’s Norman Mailer: A Double Life (2013.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Norman Mailer
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.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Apathy
I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Motivation, Motivational
There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: America
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
Topics: Journalism, Journalists
The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution’s in the soul.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Desire, Desires
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
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.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Democracy
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
Topics: Change, Existence
We are in love with the word. We are proud of it. The word precedes the formation of the state. The word comes to us from every avatar of early human existence. As writers, we are obliged more than others to keep our lives attached to the primitive power of the word. From India, out of the Vedas, we still hear: On the spoken word, all the gods depend, all beasts and men; in the world live all creatures…The word is the name of the divine world.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Words
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Men
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
Topics: Heroes/Heroism, Heroes, Achievements
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Art, Authors & Writing, Writers
Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Honor
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Socialism
Once a newspaper touches a story the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: News
Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay … a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: City Life, Cities
Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Class
The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Boredom
Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they’re all egomaniacs.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Ego
As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Fear
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.
—Norman Mailer
The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Events, Twentieth Century
Tough guys don’t dance. You had better believe it.
—Norman Mailer
There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Sex
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.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing
Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they’re all egomaniacs.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Liberalism
In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Respect
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Photography
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.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Violence, America
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.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Television
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