Norman Mailer quotes - page 8

Norman Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, and essayist, celebrated for his innovative literary style and provocative themes. A key figure in postwar American literature, his works often explored politics, war, and the complexities of human nature. He became known for his bold personality and for shaping the genre of creative nonfiction. Here are 198 of his quotes:

I don't think we're ever going to have a cheap fascism of Brownshirts and goose stepping or anything of that sort.

Norman Mailer

To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder...

Norman Mailer

We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time.

Norman Mailer

Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground.

Norman Mailer

We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art.

Norman Mailer

I had a great many prejudices that have since dissolved.

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. For the moment, then, let me say that I am thinking of Sam Slovoda.

Norman Mailer

We are close to dead. There are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium; they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.

Norman Mailer

Growth is a greater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth.

Norman Mailer

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

Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.

Norman Mailer

Patterned after an Italian Renaissance palace, it is 88 times as large and one millionth as valuable to the continuation of man. that Pentagon of traveling salesmen.

Norman Mailer

In my day the library was a wonderful place... We didn't have visual aids and didn't have various programs...it was a sanctuary... So I tend to think the library should remain a center of knowledge.

Norman Mailer

America...is being lost through television. Because in advertising, mendacity and manipulation are raised to the level of internal values for the advertisers. Interruption is seen as a necessary concomitant to marketing. It used to be that a seven– or eight-year old could read consecutively for an hour or two. But they don't do that much anymore. The habit has been lost. Every seven to ten minutes, a child is interrupted by a commercial on TV>Kids get used to the idea that their interest is there to be broken into. In consequence, they are no longer able to study as well. Their powers of concentration have been reduced by systematic interruption.

Norman Mailer

That was how the tears went down Cherry's face... a teaspoon full of ten years' sorrow.

Norman Mailer

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?

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. It's the one thing Hitler said which wasn't completely hysterical.

Norman Mailer

I give an idea to Sam. "Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered," I say to him. "Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered," he repeats after me, and in desperation to seek his coma, mutters back, "I do not feel my nose, my nose is numb, my eyes are heavy, my eyes are heavy." So Sam enters the universe of sleep, a man who seeks to live in such a way as to avoid pain, and succeeds merely in avoiding pleasure. What a dreary compromise is life!

Norman Mailer

A hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation; a hero embodies the fantasy and so allows each private mind the liberty to consider its fantasy and find a way to grow. Each mind can become more conscious of its desire and waste less strength in hiding from itself.

Norman Mailer

I had a great many prejudices that have since dissolved. But what I still hate about the women's movement is their insistence upon male piety in relation to it. I don't like bending my knee and saying I'm sorry, mea culpa. I find now that women have achieved some power and recognition they are quite the equal of men in every stupidity and vice and misjudgment that we've exercised through history. They're narrow-minded, power seeking, incapable of recognizing the joys of a good discussion. The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled. What I've come to discover are the negative sides, that women are no better than men. I used to think - this is sexism in a way, I'll grant it - that women were better than men. Now I realize no, they're not any better.

Norman Mailer