Top 250 Norman Mailer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.”

— Norman Mailer

2. “Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.”

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

4. “The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.”

— Norman Mailer

5. “You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it’s unimportant.”

— Norman Mailer

6. “You don’t know a woman until you’ve met her in court.”

— Norman Mailer

7. “Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart.”

— Norman Mailer

8. “People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.”

— Norman Mailer

9. “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

10. “Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body – it just wears it out.”

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

12. “There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.”

— Norman Mailer

13. “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

14. “Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”

— Norman Mailer

15. “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.”

— Norman Mailer

16. “Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.”

— Norman Mailer

17. “Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.”

— Norman Mailer

18. “Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic; San Francisco is a lady.”

— Norman Mailer

19. “If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.”

— Norman Mailer

20. “We didn’t win the Cold War, we were just a big bank that bankrupted a smaller bank because we had an arms race that wiped the Russians out.”

— Norman Mailer

21. “I don’t hate women, but I think they should be kept in cages.”

— Norman Mailer

22. “There is a no man’s land between sex and love, and it alters in the night.”

— Norman Mailer

23. “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.”

— Norman Mailer

24. “Boredom slays more of existence than war.”

— Norman Mailer

25. “You have the right to speak your mind.”

— Norman Mailer

26. “Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.”

— Norman Mailer

27. “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

28. “I hate everything which is not in myself.”

— Norman Mailer

29. “No heart is so hard as the timid heart.”

— Norman Mailer

30. “No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.”

— Norman Mailer

31. “Tough guys don’t dance. You had better believe it.”

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

33. “Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.”

— Norman Mailer

34. “There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.”

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

36. “You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that’s the highest effectiveness man has achieved.”

— Norman Mailer

37. “A democracy depends upon people getting brighter all the time. Democracies are delicate. They’re not just ipso facto and just go on and on.”

— Norman Mailer

38. “I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.”

— Norman Mailer

39. “One thing I’ve learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don’t feel it; there’s probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.”

— Norman Mailer

40. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

42. “It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.”

— Norman Mailer

43. “Insanity consists of building major structures upon foundations which do not exist.”

— Norman Mailer

44. “The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.”

— Norman Mailer

45. “Dying can’t be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.”

— Norman Mailer

46. “We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.”

— Norman Mailer

47. “Alimony is the curse of the writing class.”

— Norman Mailer

48. “For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself.”

— Norman Mailer

49. “Sex is not only a divine and beautiful activity; it’s a murderous activity. People kill each other in bed. Some of the greatest crimes ever committed were committed in bed. And no weapons were used.”

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer