Top 15 Norman Mailer Quotes

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.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.

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.

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

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.