Norman Mailer Quotes

171 Sourced Quotes

People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

Norman Mailer
I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.

Norman Mailer
To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you.

Norman Mailer
I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

Norman Mailer
Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It's an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.

Norman Mailer
In every death is a celebration; in every ecstasy, one little death.

Norman Mailer
The only thing of which I could be certain was that everyone had information to offer, spoke in a voice that was full of authority, and contradicted what the last fellow had said.

Norman Mailer
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
The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten; the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.

Norman Mailer
You do not really wish to hear more of the Battle of Kadesh. Let me say only that human fat, gorged in considerable quantity, has an intoxicating effect. I became... drunk.

Norman Mailer
Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence.

Norman Mailer
Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought.

Norman Mailer
Even an evil man can have principles—he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy.

Norman Mailer
To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.

Norman Mailer
Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to function long enough to give an opportunity to discover where the failure occurred. Most early debacles were so benighted that rocket engineers could have been forgiven for daubing the blood of a virgin goat on the orifice of the firing chamber.

Norman Mailer
Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.

Norman Mailer
Physics was sex, conception and the communion of the family — engineering was getting the eggs out on time... physics was love and engineering was marriage.

Norman Mailer
I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.

Norman Mailer
A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.

Norman Mailer
Over the years, I've found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write.

Norman Mailer
Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.

Norman Mailer