Norman Mailer Quotes

He does see Himself as the Divine Artist. Of course, He is also a blunderer — so many of His creations are botched. A good many are disasters which He then proceeds to plow back into the food chain. That is His only means of keeping His multitudinous, mediocre, and often meaningless spawnings from choking the existence of the rest. Yet, I will admit, He is dogged. He is still looking to improve His previous creations.

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

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

It takes all kinds to make a world.

Politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.

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

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

The novelist, thinks Sam, perspiring beneath blankets, must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all. The feminine in his nature cries out for proof he is a man; he loves himself and therefore despises all that he is.

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.

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

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

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.

I ask, "Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in his weary cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits."

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