Best 249 quotes of Norman Mailer on MyQuotes

Mailer's Law: A thing either gets better or it costs more to run it the way it was.

Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.

MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience.

Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.

Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.

Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.

...never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile.

No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.

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.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.

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.

One will feel the same subtle nausea coming into the city or waiting to depart from it that one feels now in such plastic catacombs as O'Hare's reception center in Chicago.

Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It's an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.

Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing

Over the years, I've found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write.

Part of the oncoming demise (of New York during its terrible fiscal crisis) is that none of us can simply believe it. We were always the best and the strongest of cities, and our people were vital to the teeth. Knock them down eight times and they would get up with that look in the eye which suggests the fight has barely begun.

Patterned after an Italian Renaissance palace, it is 88 times as large and one millionth as valuable to the continuation of man. that Pentagon of traveling salesmen.

People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.

People who live under fascism are not only miserable but they're full of shame. You just don't go in and inject democracy into them. They're half crazy with their own.

Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.

Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence.

Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

Sex is not only a divine and beautiful activity; it's a murderous activity. People kill each other in bed. Some of the greatest crimes ever committed were committed in bed. And no weapons were used.

Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.

Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.

Since great writers communicate a vision of existence, one can't borrow their methods. The method is married to the vision.

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.

Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.

So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.

So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.

Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.

The Barry Goldwater movement excited the depths because the apocalypse was brought more near, and like millions of other whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too pointless and a trifle too full of guilt and my gullet was close to nausea with the empty promises of an empty liberal center.

The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars.

The condition that is most disagreeable in your life becomes the most useful one. You know, I feel the same way about the U.S. Army. It was absolutely the worst experience of my life, and it was probably the single most valuable experience.

The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten; the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.

The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.

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.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

The essence of spirit ... 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.

The fact that we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic's assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.

The great power in America is the corporations - we`re a corporate country. We`re run by a CEO and the stockholders have very little to say on how the corporation is run. Fine, the board of directors run it and the stockholders can just be disgruntled, but who gives a damn?

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.

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.