Norman Mailer Quotes - 9quotes.com

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There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
Written by Norman Mailer
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
Written by Norman Mailer
Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
Written by Norman Mailer
Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.
Written by Norman Mailer
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
Written by Norman Mailer
There are four stages in a marriage. First there's the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
Written by Norman Mailer
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.
Written by Norman Mailer
When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
Written by Norman Mailer
It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.
Written by Norman Mailer
Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
Written by Norman Mailer
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
Written by Norman Mailer
Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.
Written by Norman Mailer
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
Written by Norman Mailer
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.
Written by Norman Mailer
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.
Written by Norman Mailer
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.
Written by Norman Mailer
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.
Written by Norman Mailer
There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
Written by Norman Mailer
Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
Written by Norman Mailer
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.
Written by Norman Mailer
The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
Written by Norman Mailer
In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.
Written by Norman Mailer
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.
Written by Norman Mailer
A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
Written by Norman Mailer
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Written by Norman Mailer
Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
Written by Norman Mailer
In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.
Written by Norman Mailer
I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.
Written by Norman Mailer
Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
Written by Norman Mailer
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
Written by Norman Mailer

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