Norman Mailer quotes - page 7

It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions. (Norman Mailer)
Alimony is the curse of the writing class. View quote
Norman Mailer
Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another. View quote
Norman Mailer
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 and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods. View quote
Norman Mailer
To be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself - one must know one's desires, one's rages, one's anguish, one must be aware of the character of one's frustration and know what would satisfy it. The over-civilized man can be an existentialist only if it is chic, and deserts it quickly for the next chic. View quote
Norman Mailer
"Advertisement for 'Games and Ends'", Pt. 5. View quote
Norman Mailer
We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd... Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste...? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding? View quote
Norman Mailer
No heart is so hard as the timid heart. View quote
Norman Mailer
Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts. View quote
Norman Mailer
It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway. View quote
Norman Mailer
To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder... The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates. (Norman Mailer)
We can never know for certain where our prayers are likely to go, nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil. View quote
Norman Mailer
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, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness -- the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others. View quote
Norman Mailer
We've got an agreeable, comfortable life here as Americans. But under it there's a huge, free-floating anxiety. View quote
Norman Mailer
A hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation. View quote
Norman Mailer
America is a nation of experts without roots; we are always creating tacticians who are blind to strategy and strategists who cannot take a step. View quote
Norman Mailer
America was the land where people still believed in heroes. View quote
Norman Mailer
There's a detachment that you need as a writer. And as a young man, I probably had more detachment than I have today. View quote
Norman Mailer
I love the idea of a left conservative because it gets rid of political cant. We're stifling in it. View quote
Norman Mailer
One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. View quote
Norman Mailer
Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. (Norman Mailer)
You're a fool if you don't realize this is going to be the reactionary's century, perhaps their thousand-year reign. View quote
Norman Mailer
Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful. View quote
Norman Mailer
I would introduce myself if it were not useless. The name I had last night will not be the same as the name I have tonight. View quote
Norman Mailer
The concept of hero is antagonistic to impersonal social progress. View quote
Norman Mailer