Norman Mailer quotes - page 4

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 nothing to do with the Mafia, the syndicate, it has nothing to do with trust-busting, it has nothing to do with interstate commerce, it has nothing to do with anything but serving as a church for the mediocre. A high church for the true mediocre. (Norman Mailer)
New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington wink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St. Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities. View quote
Norman Mailer
Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit. View quote
Norman Mailer
I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946 ... We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz. View quote
Norman Mailer
A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past. View quote
Norman Mailer
On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago. View quote
Norman Mailer
The only true journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another. View quote
Norman Mailer
Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words. View quote
Norman Mailer
Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it. View quote
Norman Mailer
A little bit of rape is good for a man's soul. View quote
Norman Mailer
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, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, compromised idealism, career-advancement, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat. (Norman Mailer)
What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it. View quote
Norman Mailer
I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it. View quote
Norman Mailer
I usually need a can of beer to prime me. View quote
Norman Mailer
You're contending with a genius, D. J. is his name, only American alive who could outtalk Cassius Clay, that's lip. View quote
Norman Mailer
Booze, pot, too much sex, failure in one's private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice. View quote
Norman Mailer
He had a personality that was hopeless. He had a profound distrust of people's possibilities, and it came out in his personality. ... There was an almost indecent pleasure he took in being sentimental about all the worst things. View quote
Norman Mailer
We are as ugly as animals in our fashion, and unless we deal with the ugliness in ourselves, unless we deal with the violence in ourselves, the brutality in ourselves, and find some way to sublimate it, just to use Freud's term, into something slightly higher, we're never going to get anywhere with anything. View quote
Norman Mailer
There could be no politics which gave warmth to one's body until the country had recovered its imagination, its pioneer lust for the unexpected and incalculable. View quote
Norman Mailer
You carried it alone as long as you could, and then you weren't strong enough to take it any longer. You kept fighting everything, and everything broke you down, until in the end you were just a little goddam bolt holding on and squealing when the machine went too fast. View quote
Norman Mailer
I knew that Jack needed a lot of help, and what he really needed was somebody who could spend a prodigious amount of time with him, every night, see him, live with him, live with him the way someone in A. A. lives with a drunk. ... I wasn't doing that. So when the crime occurred - because I'd just been hoping things would work out all right - when the crime occurred, I knew that I had a responsibility on that one. (Norman Mailer)
Kennedy's most characteristic quality is the remote and private air of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, of loss and gain, of nearness to death, which leaves him isolated from the mass of others. View quote
Norman Mailer
The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again. View quote
Norman Mailer
Writer's block is only a failure of the ego. View quote
Norman Mailer
The paradox is that no love can prove so intense as the love of two narcissists for each other. View quote
Norman Mailer