Norman Mailer quotes - page 6

Witches have no wit, said the magician who was weak. Hula, hula, said the witches. (Norman Mailer)
Why else lead a life of bad banquet dinners, cigar smoke, camp chairs, foul breath, and excruciatingly dull jargon if not to avoid the echoes of what is not known. View quote
Norman Mailer
James Farley. Huge. Cold as a bishop. The hell he would consign you to was cold as ice. View quote
Norman Mailer
He has wasted the day, he tells himself, he has wasted the day as he has wasted so many days of his life ... while that huge work with which he has cheated himself, that enormous novel which would lift him at a bound from the impasse in which he stifles, whose dozens of characters would develop a vision of life in bountiful complexity, lies foundering, rotting on a beach of purposeless effort. Notes here, pages there, it sprawls through a formless wreck of incidental ideas and half-episodes; utterly without shape. He is not even a hero for it. View quote
Norman Mailer
One gets the impression that people come to Los Angeles in order to divorce themselves from the past, here to live or try to live in the rootless pleasure world of an adult child. View quote
Norman Mailer
The twentieth century may yet be seen as that era when civilized man and underprivileged man were melted together into mass man. View quote
Norman Mailer
The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful. View quote
Norman Mailer
The need of the city is to accelerate growth; the pride of the small town is to retard it. View quote
Norman Mailer
There was never a revolution to equal it, and never a city more glorious than Petrograd, and for all that period of my life I lived another and braved the ice of winter and the summer flies in Vyborg while across my adopted country of the past, winds of the revolution blew their flame, and all of us suffered hunger while we drank at the wine of equality. View quote
Norman Mailer
For years Pershing Square has been one of the three or four places in America famous to homosexuals, famous not for its posh, the chic is round-heeled here, but because it is one of the avatars of good old masturbatory sex, dirty with the crusted sugars of smut, dirty rooming houses around the corner where the score is made, dirty book and photograph stores down the street. View quote
Norman Mailer
Eleanor Roosevelt, fine, precise, hand-worked like ivory. Her voice was almost attractive ... One had the impression of a lady who was finally becoming a woman, which is to say that she was just a little bitchy about it all; nice bitchy, charming, it had a touch of art to it, but it made one wonder if she were not now satisfying the last passion of them all, which was to become physically attractive, for she was better-looking than she had ever been. (Norman Mailer)
One can indeed be restored, by an exceptional demonstration of love. View quote
Norman Mailer
The novelist, thinks Sam, perspiring beneath blankets, must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all. The feminine in his nature cries out for proof he is a man; he loves himself and therefore despises all that he is. View quote
Norman Mailer
It is the smell of the stockyards, all of it taken together, a smell so bad one must go down to visit the killing of the animals or never eat meat again. Watching the animals be slaughtered, one knows the human case - no matter how close to angel we may come, the butcher is equally there. View quote
Norman Mailer
In tranquility one recollects them with affection, their instinct is good, crazy family good. View quote
Norman Mailer
It was almost as if there were no peace unless one could fight well, kill well (if always with honor), love well and love many. ... It was as if the message in the labyrinth of the genes would insist that violence was locked with creativity, and adventure was the secret of love. View quote
Norman Mailer
The storm approaches its thunderhead, and it is apparent that the boat drifts ever closer to shore. So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost. View quote
Norman Mailer
The excessive hysteria of the Red wave was no preparation to face an enemy, but rather a terror of the national self. View quote
Norman Mailer
I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life. ... Every time I get totally discouraged with this country, I remind myself, "No, the fact is that finally we can really say what we think, and some extraordinary things have come out of that." View quote
Norman Mailer
Then vote for him the boss will if he must; he cannot be caught on the wrong side, but he does not feel the pleasure of a personal choice. Which is the center of the panic. View quote
Norman Mailer
Hitler ... was a hero, the hero-as-monster, embodying what had become the monstrous fantasy of a people, but the horror upon which the radical mind and liberal temperament foundered was that he gave outlet to the energies of the Germans and so presented the twentieth century with an index of how horrible had become the secret heart of its desire. (Norman Mailer)
All too often men with physical courage are disappointing in their moral imagination. View quote
Norman Mailer
Everyone from the meanest starving cripple to an ambitious young man could expand to the optimism of an improving future because the man offered an unspoken promise of a future which would be rich. View quote
Norman Mailer
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor. View quote
Norman Mailer
Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men. View quote
Norman Mailer