Norman Mailer Quotes

Mystery is an emotion which is repugnant to a political animal.

"I heard from clear across the city, over the Hudson in the Jersey yards, one fierce whistle of a locomotive which took me to a train late at night hurling through the middle of the West, its iron shriek blighting the darkness. One hundred years before, some first trains had torn through the prairie and their warning had congealed the nerve. "Beware," said the sound. "Freeze in your route. Behind this machine comes a century of maniacs and a heat which looks to consume the earth." What a rustling those first animals must have known."

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

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

We are as ugly as animals in our fashion, and unless we deal with the ugliness in ourselves, unless we deal with the violence in ourselves, the brutality in ourselves, and find some way to sublimate it, just to use Freud's term, into something slightly higher, we're never going to get anywhere with anything.

Sequestered in the depths of the average pacifist — as one will invariably discover — resides a killer. That is why the person has become a pacifist in the first place.

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

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

For years Pershing Square has been one of the three or four places in America famous to homosexuals, famous not for its posh, the chic is round-heeled here, but because it is one of the avatars of good old masturbatory sex, dirty with the crusted sugars of smut, dirty rooming houses around the corner where the score is made, dirty book and photograph stores down the street.

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

I've always felt that my relationship to the United States is analogous to a marriage. I love this country. I hate it. I get angry at it. I feel close to it. I'm charmed by it. I'm repelled by it. And it's a marriage that's gone on for let's say at least 50 years of my writing life, and in the course of that, what's happened? It's gotten worse. It's not what it used to be.

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.

. Huge. Cold as a bishop. The hell he would consign you to was cold as ice.

The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.

The twentieth century may yet be seen as that era when civilized man and underprivileged man were melted together into mass man.