Norman Mailer Quotes

Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I won't stay in
with married men
any more
said the wise girl
they're too agreeable,
it's a little too much
like curling
up
with the good book.

You mean
a
good book

Oh, dear,
did I say
the
good book
sighed the witch.

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.

One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.

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

Boredom slays more of existence than war.

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

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

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

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.