Quotes from Norman Mailer

You have to know you can take a human life before you ever put on a police uniform.

Sometimes I think our future existence will depend on whether we can keep false information from proliferating too rapidly. If our power to verify the facts does not keep pace, then distortions of information

A man lays his character on the line when he writes a novel. Anything in him which is lazy, or meretricious, or unthought-out, complacent, fearful, overambitious, or terrified by the ultimate logic of his exploration will be revealed in his book.

It is a credo for lonely people: My heart is my church.

This business of living for eternity certainly contributed to capital punishment, brutality, and war. Why, Brigham Young with his countless wives pining on the vine had the gall to state that if you discovered one of your women in adultery, it would behoove you as a good and Christian act to hold her on your lap and run a knife through her breast. That way she'd have her whack at the hereafter.

Meanwhile, a turkey dinner with all the trimmings was the highlight of Christmas Day at Utah State Prison where Gilmore is in isolation for disciplinary reasons.

his memory, like a battered drunk at the end of a spree, groped over the events of the last six weeks.

She had built up a lot of control over all these months, but suddenly it just hurt so bad that she bawled right there at the table, two seconds after she saw the broken ring. It was the first real big cry she'd had about Gary in a long time, a month or so. She was not sure there was any such thing anymore as Gary. She didn't know if that was where her belief rested. He was a lot out of her mind. He might really be dead.

If Moloch is not fed, the last stage of hell will vanish, and with it, the apparatus of hell.

No psychic reward might be so powerful as winning a dare with yourself. If you were really scared, and went through it, and came out on the other side intact, then it was hard not to believe for a little while that you were on the side of the gods. It felt as if you could do no wrong. Time slowed. You were no longer doing it. For good or ill, it was doing it. You had entered the logic of that other scheme where death and life had as many relations as Yin and Yang.

Because our tragedy is that we diverge as countrymen further and further away from one another, like a space ship broken apart in flight which now drifts mournfully in isolated orbits, satellites to each other, planets none, communications faint.

The terrible, exasperating thing about humans is how goodness and gentleness, and utter depravity and disregard for human life, can be contained within the same person, and in terrifyingly close proximity.

Casi todos nuestros clientes dejan de existir -¡no queda el alma!- o los reencarna el Dummkopf, al que no le gusta ceder a ninguna de sus criaturas, grandes o pequeñas, juiciosas o insensatas, lo cual puede que sea una razón de que el mundo esté cada vez más plagado de mediocridad.

I may never wind up being anything, but I owe it to myself to build my integrity.

Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less.

Capital punishment is symbolic of society's determination to enforce all of its laws. If we don't enforce the severest of our laws, the criminal mind might conclude (punishments of) other laws won't be imposed against them

I always thought that a man became a cop to be shielded from his own criminality.

zabitiy, which means somebody beats you, beats you, beats you, until you are beaten down.

The years pass into the years and we count our time in lonely private rhythms which have little to do with number or judgment or the uncertain shifting memory of friends.

I was in love with a beautiful, brilliant girl who was married to the most elegant and incisive gent I had ever met; there was no hope for me but, oh, the love was beautiful. Mr.

The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation

Happiness is experienced most directly in the intervals between terror.

He was drinking and contemplating his fear. It seemed to him that he had been afraid all his life, but in recent years, or so it seemed, he had learned how to take a step into his fear, how to take the action which frightened him most (and so could free him the most). He did not do it always, who could? but he had come to think that the secret to growth was to be brave a little more than one was cowardly, simple as that, indeed

Some psychic bombardment of the will to live had begun, a new particle of love's mysterious atom had been discovered — the itch to jump.