Top 250 Norman Mailer Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.”

— Norman Mailer

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

162. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

165. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

176. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

179. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

185. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

189. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

198. “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

199. “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

200. “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