Top 250 Norman Mailer Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 6

101. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

103. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

117. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

120. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

129. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

131. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

133. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

136. “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

137. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

139. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

141. “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

142. “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

143. “You, Lowell, beloved poet of many, what do you know of the dirt and the dark deliveries of the necessary? What do you know of dignity hard-achieved, and dignity lost through innocence, and dignity lost by sacrifice for a cause one cannot name. What do you know about getting fat against your will, and turning into a clown of an arriviste baron when you would rather be an eagle or a count, or rarest of all, some natural aristocrat from these damned democratic states.”

— Norman Mailer

144. “Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought.”

— Norman Mailer

145. “Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.”

— Norman Mailer

146. “Characters in novels sometimes radiate more energy, therefore, when we don’t enter their mind. It is one of the techniques a novelist acquires instinctively – don’t go into your protagonist’s thoughts until you have something to say about his or her inner life that is more interesting than the reader’s suppositions.”

— Norman Mailer

147. “Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.”

— Norman Mailer

148. “Finally he said, “I like everything that wild Irish maniac, J. P. Donleavy, ever wrote.” It wasn’t so much a discussion as a sharing of taste. He also liked The Agony and the Ecstasy and Lust for Life by Irving Stone.”

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer