Norman Mailer Quotes

171 Sourced Quotes

His consolation in those hours when he was most uncharitable to himself is that taken at his very worst he was at least still worthy of being a character in a novel by Balzac, win one day, lose the next, and do it with boom! and baroque in the style.

Norman Mailer
The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

Norman Mailer
So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purpose could be considered a white Negro.

Norman Mailer
There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.

Norman Mailer
On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.

Norman Mailer
So we think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America, Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards. She was our angel, the sweet angel of sex, and the sugar of sex came up from her like a resonance of sound in the clearest grain of a violin.

Norman Mailer
We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.

Norman Mailer
In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.

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

Norman Mailer
Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.

Norman Mailer
Factoids... that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotions in the Silent Majority.

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

Norman Mailer
I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.

Norman Mailer
The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.

Norman Mailer
You carried it alone as long as you could, and then you weren't strong enough to take it any longer. You kept fighting everything, and everything broke you down, until in the end you were just a little goddam bolt holding on and squealing when the machine went too fast.

Norman Mailer
We are a Faustian age determined to meet the Lord or the Devil before we are done, and the ineluctable ore of the authentic is our only key to the lock.

Norman Mailer
There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.

Norman Mailer
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 night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high.

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

Norman Mailer
I love the idea of a left conservative because it gets rid of political cant. We're stifling in it. One of the diseases of the right is self-righteousness. I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
One of the diseases of the left is political correctness. If you're out of power for too long, then you just get worse and worse about how important your own ideas are.

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

Norman Mailer
For that is the genius of the old man — Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful... That fine edge in Tolstoy, the knowledge that compassion is valueless without severity (for otherwise it cannot defend itself against sentimentality), gave The Naked and the Dead whatever enduring virtue it may possess and catapulted the amateur who wrote it into the grim ranks of those successful literary men and women who are obliged to become professional in order to survive....

Norman Mailer
We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd... Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste...? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?

Norman Mailer
You're contending with a genius, D. J. is his name, only American alive who could outtalk Cassius Clay, that's lip.

Norman Mailer
He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co-ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, "Give me the co-ordinates."… The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea.... Hot dog!

Norman Mailer
Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body - it just wears it out.

Norman Mailer
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
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.

Norman Mailer
Then the Warden said, "Do you have anything you'd like to say?" and Gary looked up at the ceiling and hesitated, then said, "Let's do it." That was it.

Norman Mailer