Quotes By 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.

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.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

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

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

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.

I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.

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

I hate everything which is not in myself.

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

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.

In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.

Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.

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.

Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.

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.

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

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

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.

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.