Top 280 Norman Mailer Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Since great writers communicate a vision of existence, one can’t borrow their methods. The method is married to the vision.”

— Norman Mailer

252. “While I’m working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.”

— Norman Mailer

253. “Was the conquest of space then a potential chariot of Satan, the unique and grand avenue for the new totalitarian?”

— Norman Mailer

254. “Despair is the emotion we feel at the death of beings within us.”

— Norman Mailer

255. “Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification – patriotism!”

— Norman Mailer

256. “Consciousness, that blunt tool, bucks in the general direction of the truth. Instinct plucks the feather.”

— Norman Mailer

257. “This business of living for eternity certainly contributed to capital punishment, brutality, and war.”

— Norman Mailer

258. “A cop is a human creature born stupid and raised in stupidity.”

— Norman Mailer

259. “There seems to be endless capacity for strife in your system.” “Of course there is. Doesn’t that fit human nature?”

— Norman Mailer

260. “In its true exchange, one cannot gain a great deal unless one is willing to dare losing all.”

— Norman Mailer

261. “Pain was a boring conversationalist who never stopped, just found new topics.”

— Norman Mailer

262. “When you start to open a door, the pressure has to be greatest in the beginning, yet the door moves the least.”

— Norman Mailer

263. “God is a luxury I don’t give myself.”

— Norman Mailer

264. “For if we are our own force, we are also a servant of the forces of the dead. So we have to be bold enough to live with all the magical forces at loose between the living and the dead. That is never free of dread. It takes bravery to live with beauty or wealth if we think of them as an existence connected to the messages, the curses, and the loyalties of the dead. In.”

— Norman Mailer

265. “It was as if he was saying good-bye to a man who was going to step into a cannon and be fired to the moon, or dropped in an iron chamber to the bottom of the sea, a veritable Houdini. He grasped both of Gilmore’s hands and it didn’t matter if the man was a murderer, he could just as well have been a saint, for either at this moment seemed equally beyond Schiller’s way of measure – and he said, he heard it come out of him, “I don’t know what I’m here for.”

— Norman Mailer

266. “He was released in 2006, and his memoir, the book for which he was getting the prize in Dayton, In the Place of Justice, tells his story, from being a confused kid caught in a bank robbery gone bad, to a man who had fully taken.”

— Norman Mailer

267. “The terrible, exasperating thing about humans is how goodness and gentleness, and utter depravity and disregard for human life, can be contained within the same person, and in terrifyingly close proximity.”

— Norman Mailer

268. “What have we accomplished? There aren’t going to be less murders.”

— Norman Mailer

269. “Hey, there’s a place in the darkness. You know what I mean? I think I met you there. I knew you there.”

— Norman Mailer

270. “The thought Nicole really wanted to lose was that there was no more Gary. It was a possibility she did not like to consider. It was too depressing to believe he might not be on the other side.”

— Norman Mailer

271. “Maybe it’s not what we learn that’s crucial, but the questions we’re left with. Will we always be a manic-depressive nation of the greatest and most vile achievements? Will we always be a nation of both astronauts and mass-murderers?”

— Norman Mailer

272. “I always thought,′ I said, ’that a man became a cop to be shielded from his own criminality.”

— Norman Mailer

273. “Nobody is ever really free, Gary. As long as you live with another human being, you’re not free.”

— Norman Mailer

274. “Bessie could not keep from thinking, “His nightmare will be over, but mine will never be.”

— Norman Mailer

275. “I am a great believer in the hereafter, in karma, in reincarnation. It does make sense. I believe that God is not just a law-giver, but a creative artist. The greatest of all. And what characterises artists is that they want to redo their work. Maybe it didn’t come off perfectly, so they want to see it done again, and improved. Reincarnation is a way for God to improve his earlier works.”

— Norman Mailer

276. “Even now she was very patriotic, and like most patriots she felt strongly and thought weakly, and so it was not easy to argue with her.”

— Norman Mailer

277. “Dear Mrs. Gilmore, it’s going to be alright. Only 4 of the 5 rifles are really loaded.”

— Norman Mailer

278. “She had built up a lot of control over all these months, but suddenly it just hurt so bad that she bawled right there at the table, two seconds after she saw the broken ring. It was the first real big cry she’d had about Gary in a long time, a month or so. She was not sure there was any such thing anymore as Gary. She didn’t know if that was where her belief rested. He was a lot out of her mind. He might really be dead.”

— Norman Mailer

279. “If he had wanted to work himself silly just to make sure each little job was done right, then he better develop himself emotionally to a point where he didn’t care who got the publicity.”

— Norman Mailer

280. “Kid, I can handle anything but the middle of the night.”

— Norman Mailer

281. “No psychic reward might be so powerful as winning a dare with yourself. If you were really scared, and went through it, and came out on the other side intact, then it was hard not to believe for a little while that you were on the side of the gods. It felt as if you could do no wrong. Time slowed. You were no longer doing it. For good or ill, it was doing it. You had entered the logic of that other scheme where death and life had as many relations as Yin and Yang.”

— Norman Mailer

282. “Once in a while, like a mist passing across the sky, she would feel a strange communion with him, as if a thought had passed back and forth, and she felt happy that the strain was removed from his life and he had been set free. It was paradoxical, but she felt good about that.”

— Norman Mailer

283. “Outside, in the summer light, the horseflies were mean as insanity itself.”

— Norman Mailer