Quotes from Norman Mailer

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

Most politicians are pigs...It's a funny thing about pigs...They have an odd way of keeping warm in winter if they find themselves outside. You see, pigs don't know if they're cold, provided their nose is warm. So they stand around in a circle with their nose between the hind legs of the pig in front of them. Would you call that a curious relationship?...I would call that a Satanic relationship.

Hey, there's a place in the darkness. You know what I mean? I think I met you there. I knew you there.

I'm not saying its right to break the law. I'm not talkin about that—but these prisons as they exist are wrong.

When a child has seven baby-sitters, it will lose an eye.

As inquiry, the Warren Commission's work resembles a dead whale decomposing on a beach. Yet, one does not have to view the work in this fashion. For two generations of Americans, the Warren Commission's twenty-six volumes of Hearings and Exhibits have become a species of Talmudic text begging for commentary and further elucidation. To

Maybe it's not what we learn that's crucial, but the questions we're left with. Will we always be a manic-depressive nation of the greatest and most vile achievements? Will we always be a nation of both astronauts and mass-murderers?

I heard her calling to me from caverns so deep in herself she was never aware of her own voice.

By God, was Gary like Harry Truman, mediocrity enlarged by history?

Bureaucracy is the only form of human organization that can manage to pass a hot potato through a small crack.

Jazz is orgasm, it is the music of orgasm, good orgasm and bad, and so it spoke across a nation, it had the communication of art even where it was watered, perverted, corrupted, and almost killed, it spoke in no matter what laundered popular way of instantaneous existential states to which some whites could respond, it was indeed a communication by art because it said, "I feel this, and now you do too.

None of us here have spent more than 90 percent of our adult life in the cages where the animals are.

One's own literary work was the only answer to the war in Vietnam.

A strip of white paper was looped around the seat of the toilet bowl to certify that no one had sat there since the strip was placed in position. The toilet paper from the toilet-paper holder in the wall to the left of the toilet seat was soft and very absorbent, and would stick to the anus.

You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust

People with a good opinion of themselves tend to enjoy a double life.

The aim of these gatherings is to acquaint you with the factology of facts. One has to know whether one is dealing with the essential or the circumferential fact. Historical data, after all, tend to be not particularly factual and subject to revision by later researchers. You must look to start, therefore, with the fact that cannot be smashed into sub-particles of fact.

For it's exactly when we come closest to another, that we are turned away with a lie, and blunder forward to comprehend ourselves on the misperceptions of the past.

Nobody is ever really free, Gary. As long as you live with another human being, you're not free.

There is no loneliness, I decided then, that is worse than being ignorant of the worth of your soul.

He was ready to argue there was no rational way you could justify the death penalty, except to admit it was absolute revenge. If that, he would say, was the foundation of the criminal justice system, then we had a pretty sick system.

Gary Mark Gilmore: Go down on me, partner... I need it Nicole Baker: Don't call me partner. Gary Mark Gilmore: No, darlin'... I love it... I love it Nicole Baker: Yeah, you and seven other motherfuckers.

The more you give yourself to the universe, the more passive you become, the closer you will be to the secrets of the universe.

Dear Mrs. Gilmore, it's going to be alright. Only 4 of the 5 rifles are really loaded.