Norman Mailer Quotes

162 quotes in 2034 categories

• We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
• The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
• One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being,…
• In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was…
• The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
• Boredom slays more of existence than war.
• 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.
• We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore; we looked to new materials which were cooked in…
• A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing,…
• 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…
• I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old…
• Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
• Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing
• Amateurs... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.
• 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…
• There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.
• Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
• There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.
• Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time.
• We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads…

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