Words matter. These are the best Norman Mailer Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
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.
The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
Tough guys don’t dance. You had better believe it.
I hate everything which is not in myself.
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
Every moment of one’s existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
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.
Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.
Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.
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.
Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.
The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
Culture’s worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we’re all totalitarian beasts.
Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
It’s not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.
Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
I don’t think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
