There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Sex
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
Once a newspaper touches a story the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: News
Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they’re all egomaniacs.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Ego
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
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
The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution’s in the soul.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Desires, Desire
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
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Art, Authors & Writing, Writers
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: Existence, Change
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
I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Motivational, Motivation
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: Journalists, Journalism
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
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Photography
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: Achievements, Heroes, Heroes/Heroism
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
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
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: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Art, Artists, Arts
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: Cities, City Life
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 sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We’re all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
—Norman Mailer
Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they’re all egomaniacs.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Liberalism
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
Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Class
As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Fear
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Pride, Originality
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.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Lying, Lies, Deception/Lying
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
- Paul Auster American Novelist, Poet
- John Updike American Author
- Lloyd Alexander American Writer
- John Irving American Novelist
- John Barth American Novelist
- Raymond Chandler American Novelist
- Don DeLillo American Author
- Peter Matthiessen American Naturalist, Novelist
- Sidney Sheldon American Novelist, Screenwriter
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