Norman Mailer

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

— Norman Mailer

God is a creator, not a law giver.

— Norman Mailer

“So long as you use a knife, there's some love left.”

— Norman Mailer

Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.

— Norman Mailer

You have the right to speak your mind.

— Norman Mailer

Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart

— Norman Mailer

The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.

— Norman Mailer

It all comes down to who does the dishes.

— Norman Mailer

“Goldstein, you'd be a pretty good boy if you wasn't so chicken.”

— Norman Mailer

The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

“American’s capacity for real estate improvement; build yourself a house, grow fat in it, and die.”

— Norman Mailer

In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use…

— Norman Mailer

“Just as a fighter has to feel that he possesses the right to do physical damage to another man, so a writer…

— Norman Mailer

Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a…

— Norman Mailer

To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder... The Army functions best…

— Norman Mailer

“Israel is the heart of all nations.” It was the conscience and the raw exposed nerve; all emotion passed through it. But…

— Norman Mailer

We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every…

— Norman Mailer

There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without…

— Norman Mailer

“Gary Mark Gilmore: Go down on me, partner... I need it Nicole Baker: Don't call me partner. Gary Mark Gilmore: No, darlin'...…

— Norman Mailer

“It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines,…

— Norman Mailer

“It was better than floods of misery that a son of her flesh had killed the sons of other mothers. That burned…

— Norman Mailer

America has an almost obscene infatuation with itself. Has there ever been a big, powerful country that is as patriotic as America?…

— Norman Mailer

“For if we are our own force, we are also a servant of the forces of the dead. So we have to…

— Norman Mailer

The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural…

— Norman Mailer

“Roth was irritated. Just because he was a Jew too, they always assumed he felt the same way about things. It made…

— Norman Mailer

“I tell you, say the rich, the poor are naught but dirty wind welling in air-shafts over the cinders and droppings of…

— Norman Mailer

“Red had a deep loathing of the night before them. He had been through so much combat, had felt so many kinds…

— Norman Mailer

“Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get.”

— Norman Mailer

“Men who work at Time have a life expectancy which is not long said the young man from Newsweek”

— Norman Mailer

The paradox is that no love can prove so intense as the love of two narcissists for each other.

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the…

— Norman Mailer

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

— Norman Mailer

I don't want to retire. I'm not that good at crossword puzzles

— Norman Mailer

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the…

— Norman Mailer