Quotes from Norman Mailer

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.

The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.

There are two kinds of brave men: those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will.

What's the use of being a writer if you can't irritate a great many people?

No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.

I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes. If you're half evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person you are opposed to is totally evil.

Patterned after an Italian Renaissance palace, it is 88 times as large and one millionth as valuable to the continuation of man. that Pentagon of traveling salesmen.

Even an evil man can have principles—he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy.

Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

God is a creator, not a law giver.

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.

Goldstein, you'd be a pretty good boy if you wasn't so chicken.

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body - it just wears it out.

Somewhere, something incredible happened in history - the wrong guys won.

Writer's block is only a failure of the ego.

There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.

Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.

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.

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.

So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.

Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.