Top 250 Norman Mailer Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “How his hatred seethed in search of a justifiable excuse.”

— Norman Mailer

152. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

154. “The fact that we’ve been a great democracy doesn’t mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag.”

— Norman Mailer

155. “A high church for the true mediocre.”

— Norman Mailer

156. “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

157. “Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.”

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

159. “The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.”

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

161. “We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.”

— Norman Mailer

162. “It was getting to be the best conversation she ever had. She had always thought the only way to have conversations like that was in your head. Then.”

— Norman Mailer

163. “Angels often flee from people who scream too loudly – they know at such moments how close the man or woman is to us, and they feel outnumbered. For devils rush in to attend such outcries.”

— Norman Mailer

164. “Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.”

— Norman Mailer

165. “Either the century was entrenching itself more deeply into the absurd, or the absurd was delivering evidence that it was possessed of some of the nutritive mysteries of a marrow which would yet feed the armies of the absurd.”

— Norman Mailer

166. “What’s the use of being a writer if you can’t irritate a great many people?”

— Norman Mailer

167. “It was better than floods of misery that a son of her flesh had killed the sons of other mothers. That burned in her heart like the pain which flared in the arthritis of her knees. Pain was a boring conversationalist who never stopped, just found new topics. Bess.”

— Norman Mailer

168. “Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It’s an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.”

— Norman Mailer

169. “There’s a tendency for Americans, particularly the simpler you are, the more you believe in the president as the kind of person to be.”

— Norman Mailer

170. “Sequestered in the depths of the average pacifist – as one will invariably discover – resides a killer. That is why the person has become a pacifist in the first place.”

— Norman Mailer

171. “If the world turned Fascist, if Cummings had his century, there was a little thing he could do. There was always terrorism. But a neat terrorism with nothing sloppy about it, no machine guns, no grenades, no bombs, nothing messy, no indiscriminate killing. Merely the knife and the garrote, a few trained men, and a list of fifty bastards to be knocked off, and then another fifty.”

— Norman Mailer

172. “Sometimes I think our future existence will depend on whether we can keep false information from proliferating too rapidly. If our power to verify the facts does not keep pace, then distortions of information will eventually choke us.”

— Norman Mailer

173. “Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.”

— Norman Mailer

174. “You’re gambling with something vital. Most writers get smashed egos.”

— Norman Mailer

175. “When a novel comes, it’s a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.”

— Norman Mailer

176. “The world’s not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.”

— Norman Mailer

177. “If you can change style, why stick to one style? Style is a vanity because it gives you product identification.”

— Norman Mailer

178. “Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.”

— Norman Mailer

179. “She was a good girl, he said to himself. He was thinking without quite phrasing it that no other person had ever understood him so fully, and he felt a secret relief as he realized that she had understood him and still loved him.”

— Norman Mailer

180. “Our minds race ahead of us and summon strangers.”

— Norman Mailer

181. “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.”

— Norman Mailer

182. “What enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers – there are only questions.”

— Norman Mailer

183. “I must purchase this eunuch from You,” she said to Ptah-nem-hotep, Who smiled agreeably. “Are they not delightful?” He asked, and looked at the dark bodies of these five slaves with the same love I had seen my great-grandfather give to a team of matched horses or twin bulls, and indeed, since the slave wore nothing, one could see not only their plump and muscular haunches, but the shiny stump where their testicles had been and this gave them a nice resemblance to geldings.”

— Norman Mailer

184. “I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.”

— Norman Mailer

185. “I can’t get excited about politics, but I love it as a game. Because what I love in politics – this is very selfish of me, but who cares – what I do love in politics is this ability it has to make you think in new ways.”

— Norman Mailer

186. “There’s that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.”

— Norman Mailer

187. “If men could move out of infancy at half a mile an hour and get up to eighteen thousand miles an hour in one lifetime, well, who was to assume that the walls of the universe were safe from future men?”

— Norman Mailer

188. “Patterned after an Italian Renaissance palace, it is 88 times as large and one millionth as valuable to the continuation of man. that Pentagon of traveling salesmen.”

— Norman Mailer

189. “And with it all, he was proud of himself. He had brought his mother to tears. “Let her cry for once. Not me. It is time for her to learn.”

— Norman Mailer

190. “I live by the law of averages,” said Alois. “I prefer to think of the ongoing possibility of profit rather than of the intermittent perils that surround all activity.”

— Norman Mailer

191. “Where, in what cemetery of the heavens, did the tender words of lovers rest when they loved no longer?”

— Norman Mailer

192. “The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic’s assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.”

— Norman Mailer

193. “The true religion of America has always been America.”

— Norman Mailer

194. “God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.”

— Norman Mailer

195. “Just as a fighter has to feel that he possesses the right to do physical damage to another man, so a writer has to be ready to take chances with his readers’ lives.”

— Norman Mailer

196. “Writers don’t have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.”

— Norman Mailer

197. “All you need do is nod. I already know nine parts in ten of what he will say, but it is like fishing. Be patient, and you will get what you came for.”

— Norman Mailer

198. “The women’s movement is filled with tyrants, just as men’s political movements are equally filled.”

— Norman Mailer

199. “Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.”

— Norman Mailer

200. “A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.”

— Norman Mailer