Norman Mailer Quotes

171 Sourced Quotes

The only true journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.

Norman Mailer
I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.

Norman Mailer
We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.

Norman Mailer
Growth is a greater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth.

Norman Mailer
He has wasted the day, he tells himself, he has wasted the day as he has wasted so many days of his life … while that huge work with which he has cheated himself, that enormous novel which would lift him at a bound from the impasse in which he stifles, whose dozens of characters would develop a vision of life in bountiful complexity, lies foundering, rotting on a beach of purposeless effort. Notes here, pages there, it sprawls through a formless wreck of incidental ideas and half-episodes; utterly without shape. He is not even a hero for it.

Norman Mailer
It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.

Norman Mailer
A night journey on a bus was one of the few times when everything ambitious, wild, overconceived, hopeless, garish, and suffocatingly technical in American life nonetheless came together long enough to give the citizens a little peace, for it was only when they were on the move that Americans could feel anchored in their memories.

Norman Mailer
There was never a revolution to equal it, and never a city more glorious than Petrograd, and for all that period of my life I lived another and braved the ice of winter and the summer flies in Vyborg while across my adopted country of the past, winds of the revolution blew their flame, and all of us suffered hunger while we drank at the wine of equality.

Norman Mailer
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor. 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
The storm approaches its thunderhead, and it is apparent that the boat drifts ever closer to shore. So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.

Norman Mailer
There is probably no sensitive heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.

Norman Mailer
He had a personality that was hopeless. He had a profound distrust of people's possibilities, and it came out in his personality. … There was an almost indecent pleasure he took in being sentimental about all the worst things.

Norman Mailer
Witches have no wit, said the magician who was weak. Hula, hula, said the witches.

Norman Mailer
Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit.

Norman Mailer
I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946.... We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.

Norman Mailer
This is D. J., Disc Jockey to America turning off. Vietnam, hot dam.

Norman Mailer
All the security around the American president is just to make sure the man who shoots him gets caught.

Norman Mailer
What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person.... They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.

Norman Mailer
I knew that Jack needed a lot of help, and what he really needed was somebody who could spend a prodigious amount of time with him, every night, see him, live with him, live with him the way someone in A. A. lives with a drunk. … I wasn't doing that. So when the crime occurred — because I'd just been hoping things would work out all right — when the crime occurred, I knew that I had a responsibility on that one.

Norman Mailer
Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is the growth of madness denied.

Norman Mailer
Most men become men at the cost of a certain innate sense of decency.

Norman Mailer
Croft had an instinctive knowledge of land, sensed the stresses and torsions that had first erupted it, the abrasions of wind and water. The platoon had long ceased to question any direction he took; they knew he would be right as infallibly as sun after darkness or fatigue after a long march.

Norman Mailer
What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer — war, and the preparations for new war.

Norman Mailer
You should know more about human nature every year of your life.

Norman Mailer
There's such a thing as having too much style. I think the only one who ever got away with it is Proust. He really had a perfect mating of material and style. Usually if you have a great style your material will be more constrained. That applies to Henry James and it applies to Hemingway.

Norman Mailer
For me violent moments are always existential moments. They are crucial.

Norman Mailer
There are two kinds of brave men: those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will.

Norman Mailer
Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it.

Norman Mailer
Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.

Norman Mailer
The fact that we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag.

Norman Mailer