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Norman Mailer
150 quotes
“The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was a fool — a brilliant man and I loved his beard, and there was the mountain ax in his brain, and all the blood poured out, and he could not see the Mexican sun. Your people raised the ax, and the last blood of revolutionary mankind, his poor blood, ran into the carpet.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I ask, "Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in his weary cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The storm approaches its thunderhead, and it is apparent that the boat drifts ever closer to shore. So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I would introduce myself if it were not useless. The name I had last night will not be the same as the name I have tonight. For the moment, then, let me say that I am thinking of Sam Slovoda.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am convinced the most unfortunate people are those who would make an art of love. It sours other effort. Of all artists, they are certainly the most wretched.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The novelist, thinks Sam, perspiring beneath blankets, must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all. The feminine in his nature cries out for proof he is a man; he loves himself and therefore despises all that he is.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He has wasted the day, he tells himself, he has wasted the day as he has wasted so many days of his life … while that huge work with which he has cheated himself, that enormous novel which would lift him at a bound from the impasse in which he stifles, whose dozens of characters would develop a vision of life in bountiful complexity, lies foundering, rotting on a beach of purposeless effort. Notes here, pages there, it sprawls through a formless wreck of incidental ideas and half-episodes; utterly without shape. He is not even a hero for it.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“However could he organize his novel? What form to give it? It is so complex. Too loose, thinks Sam, too scattered.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I give an idea to Sam. "Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered," I say to him. "Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered," he repeats after me, and in desperation to seek his coma, mutters back, "I do not feel my nose, my nose is numb, my eyes are heavy, my eyes are heavy." So Sam enters the universe of sleep, a man who seeks to live in such a way as to avoid pain, and succeeds merely in avoiding pleasure. What a dreary compromise is life!”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is probably no sensitive heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had my good looks, my blond hair, my height, build, and bullfighting school, I suppose I became one of the Village equivalents of an Eagle Scout badge for the girls. I was one of the credits needed for a diploma in the sexual humanities.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When the wind carries a cry which is meaningful to human ears, it is simpler to believe the wind shares with us some part of the emotion of Being than that the mysteries of a hurricane's rising murmur reduce to no more than the random collision of insensate molecules.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The White Negro", first published in Dissent (Summer 1957)
“To be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself — one must know one’s desires, one’s rages,one’s anguish, one must be aware of the character of one’s frustration and know what would satisfy it.The over-civilized man can be an existentialist only if it is chic, and deserts it quickly for the next chic.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The White Negro", first published in Dissent (Summer 1957)
“America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The White Protestant's ultimate sympathy must be with science, factology, and committee rather than with sex, birth, heat, flesh, creation, the sweet and the funky; they must vote, manipulate, control, and direct, these Protestants who are the center of power in our land, they must go for what they believe is reason when it is only the Square logic of the past.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Advertisement for 'Games and Ends'", Pt. 5”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The hipster comes our of a muted rebellion of the proletariat, he is, so to say, the lazy proletariat. The beatnik - often Jewish - comes from the middle class, and twenty-five years ago would have join the YCL [Young Communist League]. Today, he chooses not to work as a sentence against the conformity of his parents. Therefore he can feel moral value in his good-bye to society. The hipster is more easygoing about the drag and value of a moneyless life of leisure.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mysteries are irritated by facts.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mystery is an emotion which is repugnant to a political animal.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why else lead a life of bad banquet dinners, cigar smoke, camp chairs, foul breath, and excruciatingly dull jargon if not to avoid the echoes of what is not known.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pompous words and long pauses which lay like a leaden pain over fever, the fever that one is in, over, or is it that one is just behind history?”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“America is a nation of experts without roots; we are always creating tacticians who are blind to strategy and strategists who cannot take a step, and when the culture has finished its work the institutions handcuff the infirmity.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Then vote for him the boss will if he must; he cannot be caught on the wrong side, but he does not feel the pleasure of a personal choice. Which is the center of the panic.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One gets the impression that people come to Los Angeles in order to divorce themselves from the past, here to live or try to live in the rootless pleasure world of an adult child.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Los Angeles is the home of self-expression, but the artists are middle-class and middling-minded; no passions will calcify here for years in the gloom to be revealed a decade later as the tessellations of hard and fertile work. … In this land of the pretty-pretty, the virility is in the barbarisms, the vulgarities, it is in the huge billboards, the screamers of the neon lighting, the shouting farm-utensil colors of the gas stations and monster drugstores, it is in the swing of the sports cars, hot rods, convertibles.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In tranquility one recollects them with affection, their instinct is good, crazy family good.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For years Pershing Square has been one of the three or four places in America famous to homosexuals, famous not for its posh, the chic is round-heeled here, but because it is one of the avatars of good old masturbatory sex, dirty with the crusted sugars of smut, dirty rooming houses around the corner where the score is made, dirty book and photograph stores down the street.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Eleanor Roosevelt, fine, precise, hand-worked like ivory. Her voice was almost attractive … One had the impression of a lady who was finally becoming a woman, which is to say that she was just a little bitchy about it all; nice bitchy, charming, it had a touch of art to it, but it made one wonder if she were not now satisfying the last passion of them all, which was to become physically attractive, for she was better-looking than she had ever been.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“. Huge. Cold as a bishop. The hell he would consign you to was cold as ice.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics which is concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull if not for the consequences of the actions of some of these men; and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The twentieth century may yet be seen as that era when civilized man and underprivileged man were melted together into mass man.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“America was the country in which the dynamic myth of the Renaissance — that every man was potentially extraordinary — knew its most passionate persistence. Simply, America was the land where people still believed in heroes.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was almost as if there were no peace unless one could fight well, kill well (if always with honor), love well and love many. … It was as if the message in the labyrinth of the genes would insist that violence was locked with creativity, and adventure was the secret of love.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The excessive hysteria of the Red wave was no preparation to face an enemy, but rather a terror of the national self.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation; a hero embodies the fantasy and so allows each private mind the liberty to consider its fantasy and find a way to grow. Each mind can become more conscious of its desire and waste less strength in hiding from itself.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hitler … was a hero, the hero-as-monster, embodying what had become the monstrous fantasy of a people, but the horror upon which the radical mind and liberal temperament foundered was that he gave outlet to the energies of the Germans and so presented the twentieth century with an index of how horrible had become the secret heart of its desire.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everyone from the meanest starving cripple to an ambitious young man could expand to the optimism of an improving future because the man offered an unspoken promise of a future which would be rich.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The concept of hero is antagonistic to impersonal social progress, to the belief that social ills can be solved by social legislating, for it sees a country as all-but-trapped in its character until it has a hero who reveals the character of the country to itself.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Eisenhower could stand as a hero only for that large number of Americans who were most proud of their lack of imagination.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The need of the city is to accelerate growth; the pride of the small town is to retard it.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hungry fighters win fights.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kennedy's most characteristic quality is the remote and private air of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, of loss and gain, of nearness to death, which leaves him isolated from the mass of others.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All too often men with physical courage are disappointing in their moral imagination.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source