Quotes By Norman Mailer

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

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

When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

We can never know for certain where our prayers are likely to go, nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.

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.

Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.

Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.

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

Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.

There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.

There are four stages in a marriage. First there's the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.

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

Alimony is the curse of the writing class.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.

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.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

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.

Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.

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.

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

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.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.