Norman Mailer quotes - page 3

There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away. (Norman Mailer)
Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual. View quote
Norman Mailer
Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce. View quote
Norman Mailer
Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood. View quote
Norman Mailer
The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination. View quote
Norman Mailer
You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant. View quote
Norman Mailer
You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that's the highest effectiveness man has achieved. View quote
Norman Mailer
I ask, "Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in his weary cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits." View quote
Norman Mailer
Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn't always enough. View quote
Norman Mailer
We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards. View quote
Norman Mailer
Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be." ... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock. (Norman Mailer)
The White Protestant's ultimate sympathy must be with science, factology, and committee rather than with sex, birth, heat, flesh, creation, the sweet and the funky; they must vote, manipulate, control, and direct, these Protestants who are the center of power in our land, they must go for what they believe is reason when it is only the Square logic of the past. View quote
Norman Mailer
There is probably no sensitive heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality. View quote
Norman Mailer
I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation. View quote
Norman Mailer
When the wind carries a cry which is meaningful to human ears, it is simpler to believe the wind shares with us some part of the emotion of Being than that the mysteries of a hurricane's rising murmur reduce to no more than the random collision of insensate molecules. View quote
Norman Mailer
I've always felt that my relationship to the United States is analogous to a marriage. I love this country. I hate it. I get angry at it. I feel close to it. I'm charmed by it. I'm repelled by it. And it's a marriage that's gone on for let's say at least 50 years of my writing life, and in the course of that, what's happened? It's gotten worse. It's not what it used to be. View quote
Norman Mailer
Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists. View quote
Norman Mailer
The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent. View quote
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. View quote
Norman Mailer
Every one of my books had killed me a little more. View quote
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 world. (Norman Mailer)
What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war. View quote
Norman Mailer
Culture is worth a little risk. View quote
Norman Mailer
I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation. View quote
Norman Mailer
Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is the growth of madness denied. View quote
Norman Mailer