Top 250 Norman Mailer Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Norman Mailer

208. “Certain kinds of honor could not be lost without demanding that one consecrate oneself thereafter – no matter how unsuited and unprepared – to a life of revenge. I.”

— Norman Mailer

209. “What’s not realized about good novelists is that they’re as competitive as good athletes. They study each other – where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don’t admit it.”

— Norman Mailer

210. “We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.”

— Norman Mailer

211. “God is a creator, not a law giver.”

— Norman Mailer

212. “He was full of love – for himself, first, and his prowess – such a fine power at his age. Then, he felt a degree of love for her –.”

— Norman Mailer

213. “The mark of a truly stupid man,” he announced to Klara, “is that he takes his own occupation so seriously that he comes to believe it is superior to others.”

— Norman Mailer

214. “Think of how hot a fire must be to call out the will of iron that is in the ore. Iron is strong against every force except the one that made it into iron.”

— Norman Mailer

215. “Freaks can be a fount of information.”

— Norman Mailer

216. “I do believe that America’s deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.”

— Norman Mailer

217. “The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again; it has perhaps not been here so intensely in thirty years, not since the Nazis were prospering, but it is coming back.”

— Norman Mailer

218. “What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.”

— Norman Mailer

219. “I cannot bear that chirpy Bobby Kennedy, always building his beaver’s nest with a few more facts. He needs to look into the abyss.”

— Norman Mailer

220. “One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.”

— Norman Mailer

221. “Piety can also serve as a wall to keep the pious from recognizing how profoundly angry they are at God – this God who has failed to treat them by what they see as their proper right.”

— Norman Mailer

222. “I know everything about love but Love itself.”

— Norman Mailer

223. “You can’t be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.”

— Norman Mailer

224. “Was it an hour, or a week before the light of the moon rose in the interior of my body? A bird with luminous wings flew in front of that full moon, and its head was as radiant as a point of light. That bird must be the Khu – this sweet bird of the night – a creature of divine intelligence loaned to us just so much as the Ren or the Sekhem. Yes, the Khu was a light in your mind while you lived, but in death, it must return to heaven. For the Khu was also eternal.”

— Norman Mailer

225. “When I read it, I don’t wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.”

— Norman Mailer

226. “I suspect Kierkegaard had just that in mind when he proposed that people had to be wary of feeling too saintly, since they could not be certain of the source of such feelings.”

— Norman Mailer

227. “Mailer’s Law: A thing either gets better or it costs more to run it the way it was.”

— Norman Mailer

228. “The jeep would round the bend, be hit by a dozen bullets at once, and that would be the end of his petty history of unfocused groping and unimportant dissatisfactions.”

— Norman Mailer

229. “Retaining the phrases was a treacherous enterprise, however. His greatest problem these days had been boredom. Now he had discovered its loyal assistant – poor memory!”

— Norman Mailer

230. “The compulsive talker must go through the herculean transformation of learning to quit or must become a great monologuist.”

— Norman Mailer

231. “I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life.”

— Norman Mailer

232. “I always start a book for money. If you’re married five times you have to.”

— Norman Mailer

233. “It is easy to comprehend people who are weaker than ourselves, but it is not as simple to be ready for the true feelings of those more powerful.”

— Norman Mailer

234. “One will feel the same subtle nausea coming into the city or waiting to depart from it that one feels now in such plastic catacombs as O’Hare’s reception center in Chicago.”

— Norman Mailer

235. “The Creator had His relative successes and His abysmal failures. While it must be admitted that He never gave up, even if He was not always in firm control of the earth He had fashioned, it is also incontestable that earthquakes and ice ages brought many an interruption to His experiments and savaged many of His pursuits. Why? Because He had incorrectly designed this globe of earth in the first place.”

— Norman Mailer

236. “The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten; the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.”

— Norman Mailer

237. “Then the Warden said, “Do you have anything you’d like to say?” and Gary looked up at the ceiling and hesitated, then said, “Let’s do it.” That was it. The most pronounced amount of courage, Vern decided, he’d ever seen, no quaver, no throatiness, right down the line.”

— Norman Mailer

238. “What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?”

— Norman Mailer

239. “When an officer of the law detects a vice in himself, he knows enough to start looking for its presence in others.”

— Norman Mailer

240. “He does see Himself as the Divine Artist. Of course, He is also a blunderer – so many of His creations are botched. A good many are disasters which He then proceeds to plow back into the food chain. That is His only means of keeping His multitudinous, mediocre, and often meaningless spawnings from choking the existence of the rest. Yet, I will admit, He is dogged. He is still looking to improve His previous creations.”

— Norman Mailer

241. “Since I believe that I have been a devil for many centuries and have risen in rank and been demoted, it could be asked why, with such a history, I still learned a good deal while in Russia. It is because a newly gained sophistication fades once a venture comes to an end. So we develop many new qualities of mind, but soon lose them.”

— Norman Mailer

242. “Since he had, in contrast to his delivery, a big burly squared-off bulk of a body which gave hint of the methodical ruthlessness of more than one Russian bureaucrat, Von Braun’s relatively small voice, darting eyes, and semaphoric presentations of lip made it obvious he was a man of opposites. He.”

— Norman Mailer

243. “Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.”

— Norman Mailer

244. “There remained a hole drilled through his heart.”

— Norman Mailer

245. “MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience.”

— Norman Mailer

246. “We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.”

— Norman Mailer

247. “Since the sum of her experience had told her that the majority of one’s prayers to God were not answered, she prayed now directly to us, she called upon the Devil, she implored him.”

— Norman Mailer

248. “I no longer gave a sick dog’s drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public’s literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.”

— Norman Mailer

249. “Oh, kinda playing things by ear.”

— Norman Mailer

250. “By the time his political career began, he was in command of an artwork of lies elaborate enough to support his smallest need. He could shave the truth by a hair or subvert it altogether.”

— Norman Mailer