Quotes By Norman Mailer

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

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.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

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.

It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.

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.

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

Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.

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

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

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.

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

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

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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