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Norman Mailer
150 quotes
“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.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Hip, Hell, and the Navigator" in Western Review No. 23 (Winter 1959); republished in Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988) edited by J. Michael Lennon.
“The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Hip, Hell, and the Navigator" in Western Review No. 23 (Winter 1959); republished in Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988) edited by J. Michael Lennon.
“The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today … We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Hip, Hell, and the Navigator" in Western Review No. 23 (Winter 1959); republished in Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988) edited by J. Michael Lennon.
“Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mr. Mailer Interviews Himself" in The New York Times Book Review (17 September 1965)
“You're contending with a genius, D.J. is his name, only American alive who could outtalk Cassius Clay, that's lip.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: D.J., in Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) Ch. 1
“This is D.J., Disc Jockey to America turning off. Vietnam, hot dam.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: D.J., in Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) Ch. 10
“One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness — the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in Writers at Work Third Series (1967) edited by George Plimpton
“With the pride of an artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden (1968) by David W. Noble, p. 204
“There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: News summaries (31 December 1969)
“Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn't always enough.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: News summaries (31 December 1969)
“The people who worked for NASA ... were ... part of that vast convocation of Americans, probably a majority, whom one saw in New York only on television.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Fire on the Moon (1970), Part 1, Chapter 1, page 7
“The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Fire on the Moon (1970), Part 1, Chapter 2, page 28
“What is plumbing but the prevention of treachery in closed systems?”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Fire on the Moon (1970), Part 1, Chapter 3, page 61 (referring to Werner von Braun's obligatory worry about the colossal and dangerous fuel tanks in rockets).
“The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Siege of Mailer : Hero to Historian" in The Village Voice (21 January 1971); republished in Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988), edited by J. Michael Lennon
“We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Marilyn (1973), Ch. 1
“The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Joe DiMaggio's marriage to Marilyn Monroe, in Marilyn (1973)
“A little bit of rape is good for a man's soul.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address on "Richard Milhous Nixon and Women's Liberation" at the University of California at Berkeley, as quoted in TIME magazine (6 November 1972), which also reported that at the close of his address:
“The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1977) by Laurence J. Peter
“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 (1923–2007) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Writer's Quotation Book : A Literary Companion (1980) by James Charlton, p. 43
“Culture is worth a little risk.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "The Poetic License to Kill" by Lance Morrow, in TIME magazine (1 February 1982)
“Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ancient Evenings (1983) First lines
“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 (1923–2007) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ancient Evenings (1983) Last lines
“Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Vanity Fair (May 1984)
“Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Timothy Madden, in Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984), Ch. 1
“When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Tough Guys Don't Dance as quoted in The New York Times (8 June 1984)
“Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Newsweek (22 October 1984)
“I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt … that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: His reaction to a publisher's rejection of The Deer Park because of six "salacious lines" he would not remove, as quoted in The New York Times (21 July 1985)
“On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Harry Hubbard, in Harlot's Ghost : A Novel (1991)
“What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person … They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Kittredge Gardiner, in Harlot's Ghost : A Novel (1991)
“I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Harry Hubbard, in Harlot's Ghost : A Novel (1991)
“There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The International Herald Tribune (24 January 1992)
“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.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Divina Infusino in American Way (15 June 1995)
“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.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Divina Infusino in American Way (15 June 1995)
“The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Herbst Theater, San Francisco City Arts & Lectures Series, (5 February 2007)
“Booze, pot, too much sex, failure in one's private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Sunday Herald [Scotland] (11 November 2007)
“You're a fool if you don't realize this is going to be the reactionary's century, perhaps their thousand-year reign. It's the one thing Hitler said which wasn't completely hysterical.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I hate everything which is not in myself.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder… The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And all the bright young people of his youth had butted their heads, smashed against things until they got weaker and the things still stood.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He felt a crude ecstasy. He could not have given the reason, but the mountain tormented him, beckoned him, held an answer to something he wanted. It was so pure, so austere.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Croft had an instinctive knowledge of land, sensed the stresses and torsions that had first erupted it, the abrasions of wind and water. The platoon had long ceased to question any direction he took; they knew he would be right as infallibly as sun after darkness or fatigue after a long march.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You carried it alone as long as you could, and then you weren't strong enough to take it any longer. You kept fighting everything, and everything broke you down, until in the end you were just a little goddam bolt holding on and squealing when the machine went too fast.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co-ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, "Give me the co-ordinates."… The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea…. Hot dog!”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Somerset Maugham … wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be." … I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought … or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was never a revolution to equal it, and never a city more glorious than Petrograd, and for all that period of my life I lived another and braved the ice of winter and the summer flies in Vyborg while across my adopted country of the past, winds of the revolution blew their flame, and all of us suffered hunger while we drank at the wine of equality.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer — war, and the preparations for new war.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source