Norman Mailer Quotes

American writer (1923–2007)

Norman Mailer (31 January 1923 – 10 November 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, playwright, screenwriter and film director who is considered to have been innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Pen Names: Andreas Wilson

Birth Name: Norman Kingsley Mailer

From Wikidata (CC0)

What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person … They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.

On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.

I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt … that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it.

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

When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit.

Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.

Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.

Culture is worth a little risk.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

A little bit of rape is good for a man's soul.

The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.

We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.

The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.

What is plumbing but the prevention of treachery in closed systems?

Norman Mailer Quotes

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