Norman Mailer quotes

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment. (Norman Mailer)
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level. View quote
Norman Mailer
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. View quote
Norman Mailer
The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation. View quote
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. View quote
Norman Mailer
There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce. View quote
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. View quote
Norman Mailer
The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety. View quote
Norman Mailer
In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent. View quote
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. View quote
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. (Norman Mailer)
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. View quote
Norman Mailer
There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements. View quote
Norman Mailer
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people. View quote
Norman Mailer
Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most. View quote
Norman Mailer
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Norman Mailer
There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be. View quote
Norman Mailer
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)
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance. View quote
Norman Mailer
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. View quote
Norman Mailer
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. View quote
Norman Mailer
There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God. View quote
Norman Mailer