Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Norman Mailer (American Novelist, Journalist)

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

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

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