Norman Mailer quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Norman Mailer has a lot to say. In this list we present the 40 best Norman Mailer quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
(And check out our page with Norman Mailer quotes per category if you only want to read quotes from a certain category, such as funny, life, love, politics, and more).
Norman Mailer quotes
Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
— Norman Mailer
Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.
— Norman Mailer
The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they’re trying to recapture
— Norman Mailer
Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.
— Norman Mailer
Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way.p.207
— Norman Mailer, The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker & Bad Conscience in America
The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. … His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.
— 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
Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get.
— Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
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, The Naked and the Dead
You don’t know a woman until you’ve met her in court.
— 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, An American Dream
I won’t stay inwith married menany moresaid the wise girlthey’re too agreeable, it’s a little too muchlike curlingupwith the good book.You meanagood bookOh, dear, did I saythegood booksighed the witch.
— Norman Mailer, Deaths For The Ladies
Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
— Norman Mailer
We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.
— Norman Mailer, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison
I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress.
— Norman Mailer
I don’t trust compliments. I’ve been getting them for years. Sometimes I deserve them, sometimes I didn’t. But generally when people give you compliments there’s one of two things wrong with them. Either they’re false, or what’s worse is they’re sincere. They really mean the compliment. And then they’re offering you their loyalty. And I’m kind of a stingy… Well, I don’t necessarily want to give all that loyalty back. So either way, let’s skip the compliments.
— Norman Mailer
I wonder, said the Lord I wonder if I know the answer any more.
— Norman Mailer, Deaths For The Ladies
I tell you, say the rich, the poor are naughtbut dirty windwelling in air-shaftsover the cindersand droppings ofthe past, theirvoices thickwith greaseand ordure, sewer-greedto corrode the earwith the horrorsof the pastand the voidsof new stupidity.One could drownwaiting for the poorto makeone fine distinction.Yes, destroy ussay the richand you losethe rootsof God.
— Norman Mailer, Deaths For The Ladies
Every time I move I squash something said Loathesome.
— Norman Mailer, Deaths For The Ladies
Let everywritertell hisownliesThat’s freedomof thepress.
— Norman Mailer, Deaths For The Ladies
I’m not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 per cent good and 35 per cent bad—that’s a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 per cent good, 46 per cent bad—and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I’m 60 per cent bad and 40 per cent good—for that, must I suffer eternal punishment?”Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There’s no reason to receive a reward if you’re 57/43—why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That’s almost impossible to contemplate.
— Norman Mailer, On God: An Uncommon Conversation
Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate of the sadist who stuck the pin and walked away
— Norman Mailer, Deaths For The Ladies
Boredom slays more of existence than war.
— Norman Mailer
rip the prisonsopenput theconvictsontelevision
— Norman Mailer, Deaths For The Ladies
I really am a pessimist. I’ve always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It’s something essentially splendid because it’s not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.
— Norman Mailer
How his hatred seethed in search of a justifiable excuse.
— Norman Mailer, The Fight
Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart
— Norman Mailer, The Gospel According to the Son
Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty and a sense of the novel. His rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is as pretentious as a rich whore, sentimental as a lollypop.
— Norman Mailer
There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York.” (on Tom Wolfe)
— Norman Mailer
About a week after they had come back, a load of mail came to the island. They were the first letters the men had received in several weeks, and for a night it relieved the changeless pattern of their lives. One of the infrequent rations of beer was given out the same night, and the men finished their three cans quickly, and sat about without saying very much. The beer had been far too inadequate to make them drunk; it made them only moody and reflective, it opened the gate to all their memories, and left them sad, hungering for things they could not name.
— Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
— Norman Mailer, The Castle in the Forest
It is not uncommon for fighters’ camps to be gloomy. In heavy training, fighters live in dimensions of boredom others do not begin to contemplate. Fighters are supposed to. The boredom creates an impatience with one’s life, and a violence to improve it. Boredom creates a detestation for losing.
— Norman Mailer, The Fight
Let the passions and cupidities and dreams and kinks and ideals and greed and hopes and foul corruptions of all men and women have their day and the world will still be better off, for there is more good than bad in the sum of us and our workings.
— Norman Mailer, Huckleberry Finn, Alive at One Hundred
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
As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery.
— Norman Mailer
The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide not murder.
— Norman Mailer
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.
— Norman Mailer
Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
— 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
There are four stages in a marriage. First there’s the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
— Norman Mailer
In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.
— Norman Mailer
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish