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Norman Mailer

150 quotes

“There could be no politics which gave warmth to one's body until the country had recovered its imagination, its pioneer lust for the unexpected and incalculable.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One can indeed be restored, by an exceptional demonstration of love.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Politics in America is still different from politics anywhere else because the politics has arisen out of the immediate needs, ambitions, and cupidities of the people, that our politics still smell of the bedroom and the kitchen, rather than having descended to us from the chill punctilio of aristocratic negotiation.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It might be more difficult to be a President than it ever had before. Nothing less than greatness would do.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Superman Comes to the Supermarket (November 1960)
“A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, compromised idealism, career-advancement, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At bottom, I mean profoundly at bottom, the FBI has nothing to do with Communism, it has nothing to do with catching criminals, it has nothing to do with the Mafia, the syndicate, it has nothing to do with trust-busting, it has nothing to do with interstate commerce, it has nothing to do with anything but serving as a church for the mediocre. A high church for the true mediocre.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946 … We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only true journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Witches have no wit, said the magician who was weak. Hula, hula, said the witches.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is the growth of madness denied.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd … Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste…? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are close to dead. There are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium; they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Petty Notes on Some Sex in America" first published in Playboy magazine (1961 - 1962)
“Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor. Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Petty Notes on Some Sex in America" first published in Playboy magazine (1961 - 1962)
“Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of the book My Hope for America (1964) by Lyndon B. Johnson
“There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His consolation in those hours when he was most uncharitable to himself is that taken at his very worst he was at least still worthy of being a character in a novel by Balzac, win one day, lose the next, and do it with boom! and baroque in the style.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“West of the Amphitheatre, railroad sidings seemed to continue on for miles, accompanied by those same massive low sheds larger than armories, with pens for tens of thousands of frantic beasts, cattle, sheep, and pigs, animals in an orgy of gorging and dropping and waiting and smelling blood. In the slaughterhouses, during the day, a carnage worthy of the Disasters of War took place each morning and afternoon.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the smell of the stockyards, all of it taken together, a smell so bad one must go down to visit the killing of the animals or never eat meat again. Watching the animals be slaughtered, one knows the human case — no matter how close to angel we may come, the butcher is equally there.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Chicago was a town where nobody could ever forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Historical, religious, and existential treatises suggest that for some persons at some times, it is rational not to avoid physical death at all costs. Indeed the spark of humanity can maximize its essence by choosing an alternative that preserves the greatest dignity and some tranquility of mind.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't think we're ever going to have a cheap fascism of Brownshirts and goose stepping or anything of that sort. We're too American for that. We would find that ridiculous. But there are always traces of repression. And you can find it in a Democratic government too. People who are "right-minded," you know, are always with us. But I think so long as we can move along with the economy, we're all right. It's just if there's a smash, a crash — that's when I'm not at all optimistic about what's going to happen.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I love the idea of a left conservative because it gets rid of political cant. We're stifling in it. One of the diseases of the right is self-righteousness. I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation. One of the diseases of the left is political correctness. If you're out of power for too long, then you just get worse and worse about how important your own ideas are.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We've got an agreeable, comfortable life here as Americans. But under it there's a huge, free-floating anxiety. Our inner lives, our inner landscape is just like that sky out there — it's full of smog. We really don't know what we believe anymore, we're nervous about everything.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's a misperception of me that I am a wild man — I wish I still were. I'm 68 years old. The rage now is, oh, so deep it's almost comfortable. It has even approached the point where I can live with it philosophically. The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've always felt that my relationship to the United States is analogous to a marriage. I love this country. I hate it. I get angry at it. I feel close to it. I'm charmed by it. I'm repelled by it. And it's a marriage that's gone on for let's say at least 50 years of my writing life, and in the course of that, what's happened? It's gotten worse. It's not what it used to be.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. … Every time I get totally discouraged with this country, I remind myself, "No, the fact is that finally we can really say what we think, and some extraordinary things have come out of that.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are as ugly as animals in our fashion, and unless we deal with the ugliness in ourselves, unless we deal with the violence in ourselves, the brutality in ourselves, and find some way to sublimate it, just to use Freud's term, into something slightly higher, we're never going to get anywhere with anything.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I knew that Jack needed a lot of help, and what he really needed was somebody who could spend a prodigious amount of time with him, every night, see him, live with him, live with him the way someone in A.A. lives with a drunk. … I wasn't doing that. So when the crime occurred — because I'd just been hoping things would work out all right — when the crime occurred, I knew that I had a responsibility on that one.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had a personality that was hopeless. He had a profound distrust of people's possibilities, and it came out in his personality. … There was an almost indecent pleasure he took in being sentimental about all the worst things.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's a detachment that you need as a writer. And as a young man, I probably had more detachment than I have today. So that part of me was just looking at the battlefield, and it was certainly full of horrors. There was a lieutenant with us and a driver and another enlisted man like myself. And I think they were shocked profoundly. I just thought — this is a cold and cruel thing to say, but it's the way a writer is — I thought, "Oh, this is good." Not that it was good that all these people are dead. But "Oh, it's so good for writing." There was a sense of, "This can be used.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For that is the genius of the old man — Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful … That fine edge in Tolstoy, the knowledge that compassion is valueless without severity (for otherwise it cannot defend itself against sentimentality), gave The Naked and the Dead whatever enduring virtue it may possess and catapulted the amateur who wrote it into the grim ranks of those successful literary men and women who are obliged to become professional in order to survive …”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mailer's Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition (1998)
“There was Johnson (Lyndon) who had compromised too many contradictions and now the contradictions were in his face: when he smiled the corners of his mouth squeezed gloom; when he was pious, his eyes twinkled irony; when he spoke in a righteous tone, he looked corrupt; when he jested, the ham in his jowls looked to quiver. He was not convincing. He was a Southern politician, a Texas Democrat, a liberal Eisenhower; he would do no harm, he would do no good, he would react to the machine, good fellow, nice friend -- the Russians would understand him better than his own. … Johnson gave you all of himself, he was a political animal, he breathed like an animal, sweated like one, you knew his mind was entirely absorbed with the compendium of political fact and maneuver.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington wink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had a great many prejudices that have since dissolved. But what I still hate about the women's movement is their insistence upon male piety in relation to it. I don't like bending my knee and saying I'm sorry, mea culpa. I find now that women have achieved some power and recognition they are quite the equal of men in every stupidity and vice and misjudgment that we've exercised through history. They're narrow-minded, power seeking, incapable of recognizing the joys of a good discussion. The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled. What I've come to discover are the negative sides, that women are no better than men. I used to think — this is sexism in a way, I'll grant it — that women were better than men. Now I realize no, they're not any better.”
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source