Norman Mailer Quotes

Mysteries are irritated by facts.

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.

The hipster comes our of a muted rebellion of the proletariat, he is, so to say, the lazy proletariat. The beatnik - often Jewish - comes from the middle class, and twenty-five years ago would have join the YCL [Young Communist League]. Today, he chooses not to work as a sentence against the conformity of his parents. Therefore he can feel moral value in his good-bye to society. The hipster is more easygoing about the drag and value of a moneyless life of leisure.

"Advertisement for 'Games and Ends'", Pt. 5

The White Protestant's ultimate sympathy must be with science, factology, and committee rather than with sex, birth, heat, flesh, creation, the sweet and the funky; they must vote, manipulate, control, and direct, these Protestants who are the center of power in our land, they must go for what they believe is reason when it is only the Square logic of the past.

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.

To be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself — one must know one’s desires, one’s rages,one’s anguish, one must be aware of the character of one’s frustration and know what would satisfy it.The over-civilized man can be an existentialist only if it is chic, and deserts it quickly for the next chic.

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

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.

When the wind carries a cry which is meaningful to human ears, it is simpler to believe the wind shares with us some part of the emotion of Being than that the mysteries of a hurricane's rising murmur reduce to no more than the random collision of insensate molecules.

I had my good looks, my blond hair, my height, build, and bullfighting school, I suppose I became one of the Village equivalents of an Eagle Scout badge for the girls. I was one of the credits needed for a diploma in the sexual humanities.

There is probably no sensitive heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.

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.

I give an idea to Sam. "Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered," I say to him. "Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered," he repeats after me, and in desperation to seek his coma, mutters back, "I do not feel my nose, my nose is numb, my eyes are heavy, my eyes are heavy." So Sam enters the universe of sleep, a man who seeks to live in such a way as to avoid pain, and succeeds merely in avoiding pleasure. What a dreary compromise is life!

However could he organize his novel? What form to give it? It is so complex. Too loose, thinks Sam, too scattered.