Top 255 Quotes & Sayings by Norman Mailer

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Alimony is the curse of the writing class.

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.

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.

I hate everything which is not in myself.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.

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

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.

The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.

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

To blame the poor for subsisting on welfare has no justice unless we are also willing to judge every rich member of society by how productive he or she is. Taken individual by individual, it is likely that there's more idleness and abuse of government favors among the economically privileged than among the ranks of the disadvantaged.

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