Norman Mailer Quotes

In tranquility one recollects them with affection, their instinct is good, crazy family good.

You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that's the highest effectiveness man has achieved.

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.

The paradox is that no love can prove so intense
as the love of two narcissists for each other.

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

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.

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

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

You're contending with a genius, D.J. is his name, only American alive who could outtalk Cassius Clay, that's lip.

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

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.

"I'm not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 per cent good and 35 per cent bad — that's a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 per cent good, 46 per cent bad — and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I'm 60 per cent bad and 40 per cent good — for that, must I suffer eternal punishment?

"Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There's no reason to receive a reward if you're 57/43 — why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That's almost impossible to contemplate.

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.

More sensitive than others in the beginning, we have to develop the will, the stamina, the determination, and the insensitivity to take critical abuse. A good writer, therefore, does well to see himself as a strong, weak person, full of brave timidity, sensitive and insensitive.

Then vote for him the boss will if he must; he cannot be caught on the wrong side, but he does not feel the pleasure of a personal choice. Which is the center of the panic.