Top 250 Norman Mailer Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Cancer is the growth of madness denied.”

— Norman Mailer

102. “Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.”

— Norman Mailer

103. “I start with the idea of constructing a treehouse and end up with a skyscraper made of wood.”

— Norman Mailer

104. “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.”

— Norman Mailer

105. “The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.”

— Norman Mailer

106. “I would introduce myself if it were not useless. The name I had last night will not be the same as the name I have tonight. For the moment, then, let me say that I am thinking of Sam Slovoda.”

— Norman Mailer

107. “I’m hostile to men, I’m hostile to women, I’m hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I’m afraid of horses.”

— Norman Mailer

108. “Let the passions and cupidities and dreams and kinks and ideals and greed and hopes and foul corruptions of all men and women have their day and the world will still be better off, for there is more good than bad in the sum of us and our workings.”

— Norman Mailer

109. “You can’t change a single word. What is tensile strength? It is that all the components are working together. I repeat: You can’t change a single word. The best short stories are built on this premise.”

— Norman Mailer

110. “I did like Robert Vavra’s book not only for its so very good photographs but for the text as well. He’s no ordinary fellow, obviously...”

— Norman Mailer

111. “Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing.”

— Norman Mailer

112. “As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery.”

— Norman Mailer

113. “People who live under fascism are not only miserable but they’re full of shame. You just don’t go in and inject democracy into them. They’re half crazy with their own...”

— Norman Mailer

114. “Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon.”

— Norman Mailer

115. “In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.”

— Norman Mailer

116. “A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.”

— Norman Mailer

117. “So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.”

— Norman Mailer

118. “To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.”

— Norman Mailer

119. “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.”

— Norman Mailer

120. “Then comes the left jab again. A converted southpaw? It has something of the shift of locus which comes from making love to a brunette when she is wearing a blond wig.”

— Norman Mailer

121. “Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.”

— Norman Mailer

122. “I am convinced the most unfortunate people are those who would make an art of love. It sours other effort. Of all artists, they are certainly the most wretched.”

— Norman Mailer

123. “The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they’re trying to recapture.”

— Norman Mailer

124. “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.”

— Norman Mailer

125. “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.”

— Norman Mailer

126. “We’re all divided souls, we’ve got two natures in us, You measure schizophrenia not by the fact that you’re divided but how well the divisions speak to one another.”

— Norman Mailer

127. “Great sex is apocalyptic. There is no such thing as great sex unless you have an apocalyptic moment.”

— Norman Mailer

128. “I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind.”

— Norman Mailer

129. “If only gravity were working, the path would be symmetrical, it is the wind resistance that produces the tragic curve.”

— Norman Mailer

130. “The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism.”

— Norman Mailer

131. “What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer – war, and the preparations for new war.”

— Norman Mailer

132. “Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful. In any case, good or bad, it reminds us that life is like a gladiators’ arena for the soul and so we can feel strengthened by those who endure, and feel awe and pity for those who do not.”

— Norman Mailer

133. “It’s not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.”

— Norman Mailer

134. “Mediocrities flock to any movement which will indulge their self-pity and their self-righteousness, for without a Movement the mediocrity is on the slide into terminal melancholia.”

— Norman Mailer

135. “In every death is a celebration; in every ecstasy, one little death.”

— Norman Mailer

136. “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.”

— Norman Mailer

137. “If punishment is at all proportionate to the offense, then power becomes watered. The only way you generate the proper attitude of awe and obedience is through immense and disproportionate power.”

— Norman Mailer

138. “Culture’s worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we’re all totalitarian beasts.”

— Norman Mailer

139. “Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is thegrowth of madness denied.”

— Norman Mailer

140. “No, just as Marlon Brando seemed to inhabit a role as though it were a natural extension of his mood, so Ali treated boxing.”

— Norman Mailer

141. “The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.”

— Norman Mailer

142. “Most people, no matter how brilliant, are vessels. Once you come to the end of what is interesting in them, you can touch the side of the jar. There will be nothing afterward but repetition of what you have learned already. It might take a night, a year, or half a lifetime, but once you can reach the side of the vessel, a good part of the larger feeling is gone.”

— Norman Mailer

143. “At the end of medicine is dope; at the end of life is death; at the end of man may be the Hell which arrives from the vanities of the mind.”

— Norman Mailer

144. “I usually need a can of beer to prime me.”

— Norman Mailer

145. “The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.”

— Norman Mailer

146. “Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way. p.207.”

— Norman Mailer

147. “Goldstein, you’d be a pretty good boy if you wasn’t so chicken.”

— Norman Mailer

148. “How his hatred seethed in search of a justifiable excuse.”

— Norman Mailer

149. “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.”

— Norman Mailer

150. “So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.”

— Norman Mailer