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Norman Mailer Quotes


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.

Alimony is the curse of the writing class.

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.

Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.

Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.

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.

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.

Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.

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.

Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.

Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.

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.

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.

I hate everything which is not in myself.

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.

I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

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.

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.

It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.