Norman Mailer quotes:

The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.

What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.

Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.

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.

The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.

Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.

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.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.

Alimony is the curse of the writing class.

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.

Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.

Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.

I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

There are four stages in a marriage. First there's the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.

It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.

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.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.

I tell you, say the rich,the poor are naughtbut dirty windwelling in air-shaftsover the cindersand droppings ofthe past, theirvoices thickwith greaseand ordure,sewer-greedto corrode the earwith the horrorsof the pastand the voidsof new stupidity.One could drownwaiting for the poorto makeone fine distinction.Yes, destroy ussay the richand you losethe rootsof God.

Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.

There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.

Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.

I hate everything which is not in myself.

Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war."

Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel, which consequently had to be destroyed. And then came the next shock. We had to realize that the people that did this were brilliant. It showed that the ego we could hold up until September 10 was inadequate.

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.

With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.

The great power in America is the corporations - we`re a corporate country. We`re run by a CEO and the stockholders have very little to say on how the corporation is run. Fine, the board of directors run it and the stockholders can just be disgruntled, but who gives a damn?

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.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.

I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.

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.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.

And so 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.

The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.

Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to function long enough to give an opportunity to discover where the failure occurred. Most early debacles were so benighted that rocket engineers could have been forgiven for daubing the blood of a virgin goat on the orifice of the firing chamber.

Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.

If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.

Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.

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.

The Barry Goldwater movement excited the depths because the apocalypse was brought more near, and like millions of other whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too pointless and a trifle too full of guilt and my gullet was close to nausea with the empty promises of an empty liberal center.

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.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

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.

Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.

America has an almost obscene infatuation with itself. Has there ever been a big, powerful country that is as patriotic as America? And patriotic in the tinniest way, with so much flag waving? You'd really think we were some poor little republic, and that if one person lost his religion for one hour, the whole thing would crumble. America is the real religion in this country.

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.

Goldstein, you'd be a pretty good boy if you wasn't so chicken.

Great sex is apocalyptic. There is no such thing as great sex unless you have an apocalyptic moment.

In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.

Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart

Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence.

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.

There are these two kinds of patriotism. There's blind patriotism, unflagging patriotism. And then there's the patriotism that says I live in a democracy and it's very important for the health and the life of this democracy that it get better all the time, not get worse.

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.

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.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.

There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.

Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.

Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.

Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.

Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.

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.

Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.

One will feel the same subtle nausea coming into the city or waiting to depart from it that one feels now in such plastic catacombs as O'Hare's reception center in Chicago.

Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten; the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.

I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood

There are many churches in my name and in the name of my apostles. The greatest and holiest is named after Peter; it is a place of great splendor in Rome. Nowhere can be found more gold.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

rip the prisonsopenput theconvictsontelevision

Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.

Boredom slays more of existence than war.

In the South of Spain, one could look to vice as quickly as to virtue for a sense of tradition.

The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture

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.

Let everywritertell hisownliesThat's freedomof thepress.

Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time.

I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.

It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

If only gravity were working, the path would be symmetrical, it is the wind resistance that produces the tragic curve.

Did a sense of shame ever reside in our Republican toadies? You can't stop people who are never embarrassed by themselves. Will's readiness to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse can be cited as world class sycophancy.

The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.

I take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I've learned to alternate the two as matters develop.

When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

Part of living, part of becoming a wise man or a wise woman, is to get to that point where you can have a friend for whom you are genuinely happy when he or she has a success. That's tough. Very few people get to that point. With writers it's next to impossible. You can't really bless a writer who's as good as yourself.

There are days when I'll wake up and think, oh, I've really been something. You know, it won't be the same without me. And then there are days when I wake up and I say, 'Don't kid yourself. Your contribution was minimal. You changed very little. Everything you hated prospered'.

Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.

...never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile.

...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.

A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.

A high church for the true mediocre.

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.

A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.

Amateurs... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.

Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body - it just wears it out.

Armstrong, sitting in the commander's seat, spacesuit on, helmet on, plugged into electrical and environmental umbilical's, is the man who is not only a machine himself in the links of these networks, but is also a man sitting in (what Collins is later to call) a 'mini-cathedral.' a man somewhat more than a pilot, somewhat more than a superpilot, is in fact a veritable high priest of the forces of society and scientific history concentrated in that mini cathedral, a general of the church of the forces of technology.

As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery.

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.

Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.

Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon

Cancer is the growth of madness denied.

Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.

Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.

Culture is worth a little risk,

Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.