Quotes from Norman Mailer

Even now she was very patriotic, and like most patriots she felt strongly and thought weakly, and so it was not easy to argue with her.

Vanity, complacency, and indolence were a curse, since bravery was an ascending slope and one could not rest on it. One must succeed in rising to every challenge except the ones that would destroy us needlessly.

The perception of the possibility of greatness in myself has always been followed by desire to murder the nearest unworthy.

You think associatively on pot, so you can have real extraordinary thoughts. But the more education you have, the more you have to put together . . . the more wonderful connections there are to see in the universe.

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.

Earl knew he was weak at framing questions in such a way that he could use the witness's answers against him ten questions later.

GILMORE    I've talked to people who know more than I do, and people who know less, and I listen, and I decided the only fucking thing I know about death, the only real feeling I have about it, it'll be familiar; I don't think it'll be a harsh, unkind thing. Things that're harsh and unkind, are here on earth, and they're temporary. They don't last. This all passes. That is my summation of my ideas, and I might be all wet.

For guilt was the existential edge of sex. Without guilt, sex was meaningless.

It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist—the hipster.

Maybe all illness results from a failure of communication between mind and body. It is certainly true of such quick disease as a knockout.

When America began, it was the first time in the history of civilization that a nation dared to make an enormous bet founded on this daring notion—that there is more good than bad in people.

You could obtain forgiveness for murder, but not in this life. It had to come in the next. To repent, you had to allow your life to be taken.

Margaret is kindled by it, exalted for a time, sees it as passion, glows and becomes rounded, but only for a time. After a year it is completely naked, apparent to her, that he is alone, that he fights out battles with himself upon her body, and something withers in her.

They had to recognize, Woods warned, that the law wanted to keep psychopathy and psychosis apart. If the psychopath were ever accepted as legally insane, then crime, judgment, and punishment would be replaced by antisocial act, therapy, and convalescence.

If he had wanted to work himself silly just to make sure each little job was done right, then he better develop himself emotionally to a point where he didn't care who got the publicity.

Once in a while, like a mist passing across the sky, she would feel a strange communion with him, as if a thought had passed back and forth, and she felt happy that the strain was removed from his life and he had been set free. It was paradoxical, but she felt good about that.

He was released in 2006, and his memoir, the book for which he was getting the prize in Dayton, In the Place of Justice, tells his story, from being a confused kid caught in a bank robbery gone bad, to a man who had fully taken

Executions must be a spectator sport.

Saddam, for all his crimes, did not have a hand in September 11, but President Bush is a philosopher. September 11 was evil, Saddam is evil, all evil is connected. Ergo, Iraq.

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.

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.

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.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

With the pride of the artist you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.