Norman Mailer Quotes

Collection of famous quotes and sayings about Norman Mailer.

Quotes About Norman Mailer

Enjoy collection of 100 Norman Mailer quotes. Download and share images of famous quotes about Norman Mailer. Righ click to see and save pictures of Norman Mailer quotes that you can use as your wallpaper for free.

Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
There's nothing glorious about being a professional ... Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
If the world turned Fascist, if Cummings had his century, there was a little thing he could do. There was always terrorism. But a neat terrorism with nothing sloppy about it, no machine guns, no grenades, no bombs, nothing messy, no indiscriminate killing. Merely the knife and the garrote, a few trained men, and a list of fifty bastards to be knocked off, and then another fifty. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
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
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
I heard from clear across the city, over the Hudson in the Jersey yards, one fierce whistle of a locomotive which took me to a train late at night hurling through the middle of the West, its iron shriek blighting the darkness. One hundred years before, some first trains had torn through the prairie and their warning had congealed the nerve. "Beware," said the sound. "Freeze in your route. Behind this machine comes a century of maniacs and a heat which looks to consume the earth." What a rustling those first animals must have known. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
She was a good girl, he said to himself. He was thinking without quite phrasing it that no other person had ever understood him so fully, and he felt a secret relief as he realized that she had understood him and still loved him. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
I once looked like Norman Mailer in a picture with bad lighting. ~ Danielle Steel
Norman Mailer quotes by Danielle Steel
Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
A democracy depends upon people getting brighter all the time. Democracies are delicate. They're not just ipso facto and just go on and on. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes. ~ Susan Sontag
Norman Mailer quotes by Susan Sontag
If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
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
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Roth was irritated. Just because he was a Jew too, they always assumed he felt the same way about things. It made him feel a little frustrated. No doubt some of his bad luck had come because he was one, but that was unfair; it wasn't as if he took an interest, it was just an accident of birth. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
By the time his political career began, he was in command of an artwork of lies elaborate enough to support his smallest need. He could shave the truth by a hair or subvert it altogether. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Let every
writer
tell his
own
lies
That's freedom
of the
press. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
But the young educated adults of the 90s
who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so
beautifully
got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself. ~ David Foster Wallace
Norman Mailer quotes by David Foster Wallace
Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
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
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
It's very bad to write a novel by act of will. I can do a book of nonfiction work that way - just sign the contract and do the book because, provided the topic has some meaning for me, I know I can do it. But a novel is different. A novel is more like falling in love. You don't say, 'I'm going to fall in love next Tuesday, I'm going to begin my novel.' The novel has to come to you. It has to feel just like love. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Men who work at Time have a life expectancy which is not long said the young man from Newsweek ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
American's capacity for real estate improvement; build yourself a house, grow fat in it, and die. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
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
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
The best they could? I don't think so." He paused as if to edit his woes and select the most telling ones. "Did you notice how they treated the officers? They slept in staterooms when we were jammed in the hold like pigs. It's to make them feel superior, a chosen group. That's the same device Hitler uses when he makes the Germans think they're superior." Roth felt as if he were on the edge of something profound. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing. ~ Ken Kesey
Norman Mailer quotes by Ken Kesey
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
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
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. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
I don't want to retire. I'm not that good at crossword puzzles ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
We didn't win the Cold War, we were just a big bank that bankrupted a smaller bank because we had an arms race that wiped the Russians out. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
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
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
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
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
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. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
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
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Every one of my books had killed me a little more. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
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
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
It comes as no surprise to find [Norman] Mailer embracing [in the book On God] a form of Manicheanism, pitting the forces of light and darkness against each other in a permanent stand-off, with humanity as the battlefield. (When asked if Jesus is part of this battle, he responds rather loftily that he thinks it is a distinct possibility.) But it is at points like this that he talks as if all the late-night undergraduate talk sessions on the question of theism had become rolled into one. 'How can we not face up to the fact that if God is All-Powerful, He cannot be All-Good. Or She cannot be All-Good.'

Mailer says that questions such as this have bedevilled 'theologians', whereas it would be more accurate to say that such questions, posed by philosophers, have attempted to put theologians out of business. A long exchange on the probability of reincarnation (known to Mailer sometimes as "karmic reassignment") manages to fall slightly below the level of those undergraduate talk sessions. The Manichean stand-off leads Mailer, in closing, to speculate on what God might desire politically and to say: 'In different times, the heavens may have been partial to monarchy, to communism, and certainly the Lord was interested in democracy, in capitalism. (As was the Devil!)'

I think it was at this point that I decided I would rather remember Mailer as the author of Harlot's Ghost and The Armies of the Night. ~ Christopher Hitchens
Norman Mailer quotes by Christopher Hitchens
Since I believe that I have been a devil for many centuries and have risen in rank and been demoted, it could be asked why, with such a history, I still learned a good deal while in Russia. It is because a newly gained sophistication fades once a venture comes to an end. So we develop many new qualities of mind, but soon lose them. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
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. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
I know everything about love but Love itself. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Was it an hour, or a week before the light of the moon rose in the interior of my body? A bird with luminous wings flew in front of that full moon, and its head was as radiant as a point of light. That bird must be the Khu--this sweet bird of the night--a creature of divine intelligence loaned to us just so much as the Ren or the Sekhem. Yes, the Khu was a light in your mind while you lived, but in death, it must return to heaven. For the Khu was also eternal. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Part of living, part of becoming a wise man or a wise woman, is to get to that point where you can have a friend for whom you are genuinely happy when he or she has a success. That's tough. Very few people get to that point. With writers it's next to impossible. You can't really bless a writer who's as good as yourself. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
There are these two kinds of patriotism. There's blind patriotism, unflagging patriotism. And then there's the patriotism that says I live in a democracy and it's very important for the health and the life of this democracy that it get better all the time, not get worse. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
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. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
No, but why is Croft that way?
Oh there are The Answers. He is that way because of the-corruption-of-the-society. He is that way because he is having problems of adjustment. It is because he is a Texan. It is because he has renounced God. He is that way because he was born that way, or because the Devil has claimed him for one of his own, or because the only woman he ever loved was untrue to him. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten; the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
I find it's more fun to write about something that you don't know completely and that you will discover on route. A dear friend of mine ... once said: 'The only time I know anything is when it comes to me at the point of my pen.' So I think that if you start to write about things that you know half well, that you're fascinated by, that you sense you have an appreciation of that others might not have, but you do have to acquire the knowledge as you go, you discover a great many things at the point of a pen. And it keeps the writing alive in itself in a way.
(in an interview with Martin Amis, 1991, see YouTube) ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
His deepest detestation was often reserved for the nicest of liberal academics, as if their lives were his own life but a step escaped. Like the scent of the void which comes off the pages of a Xerox copy, so was he always depressed in such homes by their hint of oversecurity. If the republic was now managing to convert the citizenry to a plastic mass, ready to be attached to any manipulative gung ho, the author was ready to cast much of the blame for such success into the undernourished lap, the overpsychologized loins, of the liberal academic intelligentsia. They were of course politically opposed to the present programs and movements of the republic in Asian foreign policy, but this political difference seemed no more than a quarrel among engineers. Liberal academics had no root of a real war with technology land itself, no, in all likelihood, they were the natural managers of that future air-conditioned vault where the last of human life would still exist. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
When you know too much information and you acquire it too easily, you tend to either use it in disagreeable ways, out of vanity, or you tend to be indiscriminate about it. I mean, in the old days, it was tricky, you had to go to various encyclopedias, you had to go to the library, maybe spend a day there, whatever. But in the end, if you found something, it was really exciting. Now you hit a couple of buttons and you get some information. Which, by the way, is almost always presented in that same goddamn mediocre style that characterizes the Internet for me. It is slightly deadening. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Hemingway and Norman Mailer might have disagreed, but there is no heavyweight champion of literature. ~ Tom Robbins
Norman Mailer quotes by Tom Robbins
I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes. If you're half evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person you are opposed to is totally evil. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
The more things you own, the more things you need to keep you comfortable. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
I have always had this very strong, call it a feeling, call it a prejudice, call it a conviction ... that the mysteries are not easily available. You have to earn entrance into them. You didn't learn things for too little. You had to pay a price. And I felt that LSD was just blasting superhighways into the mysteries. And what I really didn't like about LSD is that people who were taking it were seeming to become less and less as they took it. They got emptier and more vapid. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
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. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Writer's block is only a failure of the ego. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
NO MUSE IS GOOD MUSE
-by Rochelle Distelheim
To be an Artist you need talent, as well as a wife
who washes the socks and the children,
and returns phone calls and library books and types.
In other words, the reason there are so many more
Men Geniuses than Women Geniuses is not Genius.
It is because Hemingway never joined the P.T.A.
And Arthur Rubinstein ignored Halloween.
Do you think Portnoy's creator sits through children's theater
matinees--on Saturdays?
Or that Norman Mailer faced 'driver's ed' failure,
chicken pox or chipped teeth?
Fitzgerald's night was so tender because the fender
his teen-ager dented happened when Papa was at a story conference.
Since Picasso does the painting, Mrs. Picasso did the toilet training.
And if Saul Bellow, National Book Award winner, invited thirty-three
for Thanksgiving Day dinner, I'll bet he had help.
I'm sure Henry Moore was never a Cub Scout leader,
and Leonard Bernstein never instructed a tricycler
On becoming a bicycler just before he conducted.
Tell me again my anatomy is not necessarily my destiny,
tell me my hang-up is a personal and not a universal quandary,
and I'll tell you no muse is a good muse
unless she also helps with the laundry.
-Rochelle Distelheim
=============================== ~ Rochelle Distelheim
Norman Mailer quotes by Rochelle Distelheim
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 ... ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
I'm a great believer in the hereafter, in karma, in reincarnation. It does make sense. I believe that God is not just a law-giver, but a creative artist. The greatest of all. And what characterises artists is that they want to redo their work. Maybe it didn't come off perfectly, so they want to see it done again, and improved. Reincarnation is a way for God to improve his earlier works. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Since the sum of her experience had told her that the majority of one's prayers to God were not answered, she prayed now directly to us, she called upon the Devil, she implored him. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
I take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I've learned to alternate the two as matters develop. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
There are many churches in my name and in the name of my apostles. The greatest and holiest is named after Peter; it is a place of great splendor in Rome. Nowhere can be found more gold. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
The fact that we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existance in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
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
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
NO MUSE IS GOOD MUSE

To be an Artist you need talent, as well as a wife
who washes the socks and the children,
and returns phone calls and library books and types.
In other words, the reason there are so many more
Men Geniuses than Women Geniuses is not Genius.
It is because Hemingway never joined the P.T.A.
And Arthur Rubinstein ignored Halloween.
Do you think Portnoy's creator sits through children's theater
matinees--on Saturdays?
Or that Norman Mailer faced 'driver's ed' failure,
chicken pox or chipped teeth?
Fitzgerald's night was so tender because the fender
his teen-ager dented happened when Papa was at a story conference.
Since Picasso does the painting, Mrs. Picasso did the toilet training.
And if Saul Bellow, National Book Award winner, invited thirty-three
for Thanksgiving Day dinner, I'll bet he had help.
I'm sure Henry Moore was never a Cub Scout leader,
and Leonard Bernstein never instructed a tricycler
On becoming a bicycler just before he conducted.
Tell me again my anatomy is not necessarily my destiny,
tell me my hang-up is a personal and not a universal quandary,
and I'll tell you no muse is a good muse
unless she also helps with the laundry. ~ Rochelle Distelheim
Norman Mailer quotes by Rochelle Distelheim
Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is thegrowth of madness denied. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
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
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
At this stage of the game, I don't have the time for patience and tolerance. Ten years ago, even five years ago, I would have listened to people ask their questions, explained to them, mollified them. No more. That time is past. Now, as Norman Mailer said in Naked and the Dead, 'I hate everything which is not in myself.' If it doesn't have a direct bearing on what I'm advocating, if it doesn't augment or stimulate my life and thinking, I don't want to hear it. It has to add something to my life. There's no more time for explaining and being ecumenical anymore. No more time. That's a characteristic I share with the new generation of Satanists, which might best be termed, and has labeled itself in many ways, an 'Apocalypse culture.' Not that they believe in the biblical Apocalypse - the ultimate war between good and evil. Quite the contrary. But that there is an urgency, a need to get on with things and stop wailing and if it ends tomorrow, at least we'll know we've lived today. It's a 'fiddle while Rome burns' philosophy. It's the Satanic philosophy. If the generation born in the 50's grew up in the shadow of The Bomb and had to assimilate the possibility of imminent self destruction of the entire planet at any time, those born in the 60's have had to reconcile the inevitability of our own destruction, not through the bomb but through mindless, uncontrolled overpopulation. And somehow resolve in themselves, looking at what history has taught us, that no amount of yelling, prot ~ Anton Szandor LaVey
Norman Mailer quotes by Anton Szandor LaVey
Retaining the phrases was a treacherous enterprise, however. His greatest problem these days had been boredom. Now he had discovered its loyal assistant - poor memory! ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
When an officer of the law detects a vice in himself, he knows enough to start looking for its presence in others. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
What enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers - there are only questions. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
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
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
The novelist ... 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. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
And they were always young, Air Corps pilots and ensigns, and good-looking girls in fur coats, and always the government secretary or two, the working girl as a carry-over from the fraternity parties when she was always the girl who could be made because in some mysterious way the women of the lower classes could be depended upon to copulate like jack rabbits. And they all knew they were going to die soon with a sentimental and unstated English attitude which was completely phony. It came from books they had never read, and movies they shouldn't have seen; it was fed by the tears of their mothers, and the knowledge quite shocking, quite unbelievable, that a lot of them did die when they went overseas. Its origins were spurious; they never could connect really the romance of their impending deaths with the banal mechanical process of flying an airplane and landing and living in the barren eventless Army camps that surrounded their airfields. But nevertheless they had discovered it was a talisman, they were going to die soon, and they wore it magically until you believed in it when you were with them. And they did magical things like pouring whisky on each other's hair, or setting mattresses afire, or grabbing hats on the fly from the heads of established businessmen. Of all the parties those were perhaps the best, but he had come to them too old. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic; San Francisco is a lady ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
I don't hate women, but I think they should be kept in cages. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
There are days when I'll wake up and think, oh, I've really been something. You know, it won't be the same without me. And then there are days when I wake up and I say, 'Don't kid yourself. Your contribution was minimal. You changed very little. Everything you hated prospered'. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
In my day the library was a wonderful place ... We didn't have visual aids and didn't have various programs ... it was a sanctuary ... So I tend to think the library should remain a center of knowledge. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
I will now make an apology, although I will do my best not to repeat it. (Good readers do not read fiction, after all, to put up with the author's regrets.) I will say that having read the best and worst of novels for many years, which is, to remind you, part of a good devil's education, I know by now that not even a loyal reader can stay true to an author who is ready to leave his narrative for an apparently unrelated expedition. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul. ~ Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
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
Norman Mailer quotes by Norman Mailer
American Football Quotes «
» American Founding Fathers Quotes