Explore a treasure trove of wisdom and insight from Norman Mailer through their most impactful and thought-provoking quotes and sayings. Broaden your horizons with their inspiring words and share these beautiful quote pictures from Norman Mailer with your friends and followers on popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blog - all free of charge. Delve into our collection of the top 187 Norman Mailer quotes, handpicked for you to discover and share with others.

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. By Norman Mailer

When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are. By Norman Mailer

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. By Norman Mailer

Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn't always enough. By Norman Mailer

We didn't win the Cold War, we were just a big bank that bankrupted a smaller bank because we had an arms race that wiped the Russians out. By Norman Mailer

The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian. By Norman Mailer

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

You don't know a woman until you've met her in court. By Norman Mailer

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. By Norman Mailer

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

I don't want to retire. I'm not that good at crossword puzzles By Norman Mailer

Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it. By Norman Mailer

Don't bug me or I'll gas you said the creep By Norman Mailer

I don't hate women, but I think they should be kept in cages. By Norman Mailer

The Anti-Semiten. Why don't they ever learn? Why does God permit it?" Roth sneered. "God is a luxury I don't give myself. By Norman Mailer

Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write. By Norman Mailer

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

I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress. By Norman Mailer

If you can change style, why stick to one style? Style is a vanity because it gives you product identification. By Norman Mailer

Where, in what cemetery of the heavens, did the tender words of lovers rest when they loved no longer? By Norman Mailer

When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start. By Norman Mailer

While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style. By Norman Mailer

There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York. (on Tom Wolfe) By Norman Mailer

The Waldorf looked like one of the dead and empty spaces which collect about the exit of a man who has lost a million in an hour. By Norman Mailer

The moments like these, the passing doubts, were the temptations that caught you if you were not careful. By Norman Mailer

It is easy to comprehend people who are weaker than ourselves, but it is not as simple to be ready for the true feelings of those more powerful. By Norman Mailer

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

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

There's nothing glorious about being a professional ... Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day. By Norman Mailer

Freaks can be a fount of information. By Norman Mailer

Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought. By Norman Mailer

Culture is worth a little risk, By Norman Mailer

Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments. By Norman Mailer

All you need do is nod. I already know nine parts in ten of what he will say, but it is like fishing. Be patient, and you will get what you came for. By Norman Mailer

It was probably a damn sight easier than getting rid of a woman who had found something in him that he didn't have or he didn't care to give. By Norman Mailer

There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night. By Norman Mailer

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

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. By Norman Mailer

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. By Norman Mailer

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

So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost. By Norman Mailer

You let everything stand until it's knocked over and then you go over and write your own ruins By Norman Mailer

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

There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you. By Norman Mailer

There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be. By Norman Mailer

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent. By Norman Mailer

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

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

And dread came back like a hoot from a bully on the street outside. By Norman Mailer

Love was here today and left us dry did we deserve Him? By Norman Mailer

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

The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism. By Norman Mailer

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer. By Norman Mailer

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

There are two kinds of brave men: those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will. By Norman Mailer

The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder. By Norman Mailer

You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling. By Norman Mailer

Metaphor reveals a writer's true grasp of life. To the degree that you have no metaphor, you have not yet lived much of a life. By Norman Mailer

I start with the idea of constructing a treehouse and end up with a skyscraper made of wood. By Norman Mailer

People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much. By Norman Mailer

The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent. By Norman Mailer

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

For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself. By Norman Mailer

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

I HATE EVERYTHING WHICH IS NOT IN MYSELF By Norman Mailer

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

There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God. By Norman Mailer

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

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

What enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers - there are only questions. By Norman Mailer

Repetition kills the soul. By Norman Mailer

Every time I move I squash something said Loathesome. By Norman Mailer

Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally. By Norman Mailer

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. By Norman Mailer

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

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

What's the use of being a writer if you can't irritate a great many people? By Norman Mailer

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

The true religion of America has always been America. By Norman Mailer

What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex? By Norman Mailer

I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation. By Norman Mailer

The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor. By Norman Mailer

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

It takes all kinds to make a world. By Norman Mailer

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

To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise. By Norman Mailer

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

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

So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer. By Norman Mailer

You have the right to speak your mind. By Norman Mailer

How his hatred seethed in search of a justifiable excuse. By Norman Mailer

The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul. By Norman Mailer

It aroused my paranoia (which is always there in ready supply, since it is preferable to poor powers of anticipation). By Norman Mailer

I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered. By Norman Mailer

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

The natural role of the twentieth-century man is anxiety. By Norman Mailer

No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated. By 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. By Norman Mailer

Men who work at Time have a life expectancy which is not long said the young man from Newsweek By Norman Mailer

Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics. By Norman Mailer

A high church for the true mediocre. By Norman Mailer

I cannot bear that chirpy Bobby Kennedy, always building his beaver's nest with a few more facts. He needs to look into the abyss. By Norman Mailer

We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war. By Norman Mailer

Mailer's Law: A thing either gets better or it costs more to run it the way it was. By Norman Mailer

Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars. By Norman Mailer

Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way.p.207 By Norman Mailer

The more things you own, the more things you need to keep you comfortable. By Norman Mailer

The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world. By Norman Mailer

I usually need a can of beer to prime me. By Norman Mailer

He was full of love - for himself, first, and his prowess - such a fine power at his age. Then, he felt a degree of love for her - By Norman Mailer

And with it all, he was proud of himself. He had brought his mother to tears. "Let her cry for once. Not me. It is time for her to learn. By Norman Mailer

You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant. By Norman Mailer

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

The indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth. By Norman Mailer

The fact that we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag. By Norman Mailer

The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself. By Norman Mailer

Yeah, fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap. By Norman Mailer

There remained a hole drilled through his heart. By Norman Mailer

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. By Norman Mailer

Since great writers communicate a vision of existence, one can't borrow their methods. The method is married to the vision. By Norman Mailer

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

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety. By Norman Mailer

Perhaps the measure of the best art is that it does not excite envy. By Norman Mailer

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

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

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

Oh , kinda playing things by ear By Norman Mailer

I could not begin to mourn Deborah or my mind would ride off with me. There was nothing so delicate in all the world as one's last touch of control. By Norman Mailer

Let everywritertell hisownliesThat's freedomof thepress. By Norman Mailer

A criminal will never forgive you for preventing them from committing the crime that is really in their heart. By Norman Mailer

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

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

Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won. By Norman Mailer

Boredom slays more of existence than war. By Norman Mailer

What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war. By Norman Mailer

I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to. By Norman Mailer

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration. By Norman Mailer

God is a creator, not a law giver. By Norman Mailer

Even an evil man can have principles-he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy. By Norman Mailer

A democracy depends upon people getting brighter all the time. Democracies are delicate. They're not just ipso facto and just go on and on. By Norman Mailer

When an officer of the law detects a vice in himself, he knows enough to start looking for its presence in others. By Norman Mailer

The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another. By Norman Mailer

The paradox is that no love can prove so intenseas the love of two narcissists for each other. By Norman Mailer

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

The way you write affects what you say. By Norman Mailer

Rip the prisonsopenput theconvictsontelevision By Norman Mailer

I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind By Norman Mailer

Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual. By Norman Mailer

Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic. By Norman Mailer

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

I guess all that's left is to love the fire. By Norman Mailer

Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get. By Norman Mailer

In every death is a celebration; in every ecstasy, one little death. By Norman Mailer

The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled. By Norman Mailer

It was getting to be the best conversation she ever had. She had always thought the only way to have conversations like that was in your head. Then By Norman Mailer

Writing a novel is the closest thing a male writer will ever get to the experience of childbirth. By Norman Mailer

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most. By Norman Mailer

American's capacity for real estate improvement; build yourself a house, grow fat in it, and die. By Norman Mailer

It all comes down to who does the dishes. By Norman Mailer

So long as you use a knife, there's some love left. By Norman Mailer

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

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

The compulsive talker must go through the herculean transformation of learning to quit or must become a great monologuist. By Norman Mailer

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

Insanity consists of building major structures upon foundations which do not exist. By Norman Mailer

No heart is so hard as the timid heart. By Norman Mailer

I did like Robert Vavra's book not only for its so very good photographs but for the text as well. He's no ordinary fellow, obviously ... By Norman Mailer

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again. By Norman Mailer

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself. By Norman Mailer

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing. By Norman Mailer

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

I wonder, said the Lord I wonder if I know the answer any more. By Norman Mailer

Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart By Norman Mailer

You're gambling with something vital. Most writers get smashed egos. By Norman Mailer

I know everything about love but Love itself. By Norman Mailer

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. By Norman Mailer

At the end of medicine is dope; at the end of life is death; at the end of man may be the Hell which arrives from the vanities of the mind. By Norman Mailer

Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree. By Norman Mailer

I've made an ass of myself so many times I often wonder if I am one. By Norman Mailer

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

Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice. By Norman Mailer

Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon By Norman Mailer

Every one of my books had killed me a little more. By Norman Mailer

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

Alimony is the curse of the writing class. By Norman Mailer

Writer's block is only a failure of the ego. By Norman Mailer