Norman Mailer Quotes About Literature
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The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
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The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.
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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.
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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.
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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
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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.
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Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.
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With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
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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.
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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.
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In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.
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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.
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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.
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I hate everything which is not in myself.
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Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
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It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
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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.
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Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
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When I read it ["Tough Guys Don't Dance"], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
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