What's the use of being a writer if you can't irritate a great many people? — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
You're gambling with something vital. Most writers get smashed egos. — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write. — 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
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
The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor. — 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
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
“Writing a novel is the closest thing a male writer will ever get to the experience of childbirth.” — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
“Characters in novels sometimes radiate more energy, therefore, when we don’t enter their mind. It is one of the techniques a novelist… — 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
The novelist ... must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
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…… — 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
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
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
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
“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
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
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 Image
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 Image
So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost. — 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 offers itself. — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
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 Image
“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 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 dear friend… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce. — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation. — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
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 Image
