I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to. — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write. — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
You're gambling with something vital. Most writers get smashed egos. — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
“Writing a novel is the closest thing a male writer will ever get to the experience of childbirth.” — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It's an unnatural activity to sit at… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling. — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
When I read it ["Tough Guys Don't Dance"], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write. — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
Writing for a newspaper is like running a revolutionary war. You go to battle not when you are ready, but when action… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
Since great writers communicate a vision of existence, one can't borrow their methods. The method is married to the vision. — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
I don't read other writers because I'm writing all the time. It's too disturbing to read a writer with a good style… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
“Just as a fighter has to feel that he possesses the right to do physical damage to another man, so a writer… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
I take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
“More sensitive than others in the beginning, we have to develop the will, the stamina, the determination, and the insensitivity to take… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
Over the years, I've found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing.… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
It's very bad to write a novel by act of will. I can do a book of nonfiction work that way -… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
“I find it’s more fun to write about something that you don’t know completely and that you will discover on route. A… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
I've always felt that my relationship to the United States is analogous to a marriage. I love this country. I hate it.… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
Part of living, part of becoming a wise man or a wise woman, is to get to that point where you can… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
“The book was sloppily written in many parts (the words came too quickly and too easily) and there was hardly a noun… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
“(On choosing to write the book in third person, and using his name Norman as the nom de plume) NOW, OUR MAN… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
What's the use of being a writer if you can't irritate a great many people? — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
“Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
Amateurs... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether. — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
“Metaphor reveals a writer’s true grasp of life. To the degree that you have no metaphor, you have not yet lived much… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself. — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it… — Norman Mailer Copy Share
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… — Norman Mailer Copy Share
So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost. — Norman Mailer Copy Share
Writing for a newspaper is like running a revolutionary war. You go to battle not when you are ready, but when action offers itself. — Norman Mailer Copy Share
I would introduce myself if it were not useless. The name I had last night will not be the same as the name I… — Norman Mailer Copy Share
“City Point is so beautiful, she says. In the night they cannot see the garbage that litters the beach, the seaweed and driftwood, the… — Norman Mailer Copy Share
“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… — Norman Mailer Copy Share
Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce. — Norman Mailer Copy Share
Part of the oncoming demise (of New York during its terrible fiscal crisis) is that none of us can simply believe it. We were… — Norman Mailer Copy Share
I have always had this very strong, call it a feeling, call it a prejudice, call it a conviction ... that the mysteries are… — Norman Mailer Copy Share
I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation. — Norman Mailer Copy Share
America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants… — Norman Mailer Copy Share
Armstrong, sitting in the commander's seat, spacesuit on, helmet on, plugged into electrical and environmental umbilical's, is a man who is not only a… — Norman Mailer Copy Share
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… — Norman Mailer Copy Share
![“When I read it ["Tough Guys Don't Dance"], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.” quote by Norman Mailer](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/1ca/norman-mailer-839_asks_when-i-read-it-tough-guys-don-t-dance-i_1084128.png)
