Top 250 Norman Mailer Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 6

151. “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

152. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

170. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

175. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

177. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

179. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

181. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

191. “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

192. “Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree.”

— Norman Mailer

193. “I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one’s mind.”

— Norman Mailer

194. “Don’t bug me or I’ll gas you said the creep.”

— Norman Mailer

195. “The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.”

— Norman Mailer

196. “I take it for granted that there’s a side of me that loves public action, and there’s another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I’ve learned to alternate the two as matters develop.”

— Norman Mailer

197. “I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress.”

— Norman Mailer

198. “The way you write affects what you say.”

— Norman Mailer

199. “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

200. “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