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Norman Mailer - From the Anxiety category:
The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Artists category:
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Books category:
Every one of my books has killed me a little more. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Competition category:
What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Courage category:
Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Creativity category:
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. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Criticism category:
You're there to be shot at, and that's part of it. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Criticism category:
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. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Culture category:
Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Dissatisfaction category:
The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Eccentricity category:
I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Ego category:
I hate everything which is not in myself. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Emotion category:
Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Fashion category:
Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Freedom category:
I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Gender category:
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Gender category:
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Growth category:
Growth is a greater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Immortality category:
It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Importance category:
There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Impossibilities category:
I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity; it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Knowledge category:
The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Life category:
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. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Life category:
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Morality category:
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Movement category:
Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Obsession category:
Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Opposites category:
What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex? (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Opposites category:
What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Patriotism category:
In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Patriotism category:
Every time I get totally discouraged with this country, I remind myself, 'No, the fact is that finally we can really say what we think, and some extraordinary things have come out of that. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Photography category:
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Power category:
With the pride of an artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Prayer category:
We can never know for certain where our prayers are likely to go, nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Profession category:
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. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Purpose category:
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. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Religion category:
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. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Religion category:
Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Satisfaction category:
When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Silence category:
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. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Truth category:
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. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Tyranny category:
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. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Tyranny category:
The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Writing category:
Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day. (Norman Mailer)
Norman Mailer - From the Writing category:
It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway. (Norman Mailer)
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