Top 250 Norman Mailer Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We think of Marilyn who was every man’s love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.”

— Norman Mailer

52. “Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.”

— Norman Mailer

53. “Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.”

— Norman Mailer

54. “The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high.”

— Norman Mailer

55. “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.”

— Norman Mailer

56. “The paradox is that no love can prove so intense as the love of two narcissists for each other.”

— Norman Mailer

57. “Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.”

— Norman Mailer

58. “Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.”

— Norman Mailer

59. “Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.”

— Norman Mailer

60. “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.”

— Norman Mailer

61. “Repetition kills the soul.”

— Norman Mailer

62. “Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it’s about time.”

— Norman Mailer

63. “So long as you use a knife, there’s some love left.”

— Norman Mailer

64. “Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn’t always enough.”

— Norman Mailer

65. “I guess all that’s left is to love the fire.”

— Norman Mailer

66. “The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.”

— Norman Mailer

67. “The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.”

— Norman Mailer

68. “Somewhere, something incredible happened in history – the wrong guys won.”

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

71. “Did a sense of shame ever reside in our Republican toadies? You can’t stop people who are never embarrassed by themselves. Will’s readiness to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse can be cited as world class sycophancy.”

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

73. “When the time comes, they won’t ask what kind of a Jew you are.”

— Norman Mailer

74. “There’s an old Talmudic belief that you build a fence around an impulse. If that’s not good enough, you build a fence around the fence.”

— Norman Mailer

75. “Every one of my books had killed me a little more.”

— Norman Mailer

76. “Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existance in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is.”

— Norman Mailer

77. “Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.”

— Norman Mailer

78. “Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.”

— Norman Mailer

79. “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.”

— Norman Mailer

80. “There’s a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.”

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

82. “The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.”

— Norman Mailer

83. “In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.”

— Norman Mailer

84. “I’ve made an ass of myself so many times I often wonder if I am one.”

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

86. “Love was here today and left us dry did we deserve Him?”

— Norman Mailer

87. “It all comes down to who does the dishes.”

— Norman Mailer

88. “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.”

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

90. “Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.”

— Norman Mailer

91. “Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History.”

— Norman Mailer

92. “Growth is a greater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth.”

— Norman Mailer

93. “Love is simple to understand if you haven’t got a mind soft and full of holes. It’s a crutch, that’s all, and there isn’t any one of us that doesn’t need a crutch.”

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

95. “I don’t read other writers because I’m writing all the time. It’s too disturbing to read a writer with a good style when you’re in the middle of putting your work together.”

— Norman Mailer

96. “Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens the Devils to contest his vision.”

— Norman Mailer

97. “A criminal will never forgive you for preventing them from committing the crime that is really in their heart.”

— Norman Mailer

98. “Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.”

— Norman Mailer

99. “I don’t trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes. If you’re half evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person you are opposed to is totally evil.”

— Norman Mailer

100. “I don’t want to retire. I’m not that good at crossword puzzles.”

— Norman Mailer