Norman Mailer Quotes
January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007
More Norman Mailer Quotes
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— Ancient Evenings (1983) Last lines
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— Ch. 10 (The Deer Park (1955))
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— Ch. 18 (The Deer Park (1955))
There is probably no sensitive heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.
Norman Mailer— "The Homosexual Villain"
— This has also been misquoted as: "There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality."
Witches have no wit, said the magician who was weak. Hula, hula, said the witches.
Norman Mailer— Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 4
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— "Hip, Hell, and the Navigator" in Western Review No. 23 (Winter 1959); republished in Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988) edited by J. Michael Lennon.
You're contending with a genius, D.J. is his name, only American alive who could outtalk Cassius Clay, that's lip.
Norman Mailer— 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— D.J., in Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) Ch. 10
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— On Joe DiMaggio's marriage to Marilyn Monroe, in Marilyn(1973)
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— 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— As quoted in "The Poetic License to Kill" by Lance Morrow, in TIME magazine (1 February 1982)
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— 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— 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— Harry Hubbard, in Harlot's Ghost : A Novel (1991)
There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
Norman Mailer— As quoted in The International Herald Tribune (24 January 1992)
The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
Norman Mailer— Gen. Edward Cummings, in Pt. 1, Ch. 6
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— Gen. Edward Cummings, in Pt. 1, Ch. 6
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— Gen. Edward Cummings, in Pt. 1, Ch. 11
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— On Sgt. Sam Croft and Mt. Anaka, in Pt. 3, Ch. 3
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— Ch. 14 (The Deer Park (1955))
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— Ch. 26 (The Deer Park (1955))
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— Ch. 1 (The Man Who Studied Yoga (1956))
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— "Advertisement for Myself on the Way Out"
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— Preface (The Presidential Papers (1963))
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— "A Speech at Berkeley on Vietnam Day"
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— Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 1
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— Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 1
Obviously, he was a great American voice
Norman Mailer— Joan Didion as quoted by The Associated Press (11 November 2007)
He was by nature bound to a style of excess ... There were times when you would be fed up with him, but if you could conceive of American culture of the past 50 years without Norman Mailer, you would find it a lot drearier.
Norman Mailer— E.L. Doctorow as quoted in "Norman Mailer, the Writer As Writer" by Hillel Italie, of the Associated Press (11 November 2007)
