Quotes from Norman Mailer

To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder... The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.

I don't read other writers because I'm writing all the time. It's too disturbing to read a writer with a good style when you're in the middle of putting your work together.

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.

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery.

You never really know a woman until you meet her in court.

I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.

You don't know a women till you've met her in court.

You don't know a woman until you have met her in court.

There are four stages in a marriage. First there's the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.

We are a Faustian age determined to meet the Lord or the Devil before we are done, and the ineluctable ore of the authentic is our only key to the lock.

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.

Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence.

Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.

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

The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

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.

A night journey on a bus was one of the few times when everything ambitious, wild, overconceived, hopeless, garish, and suffocatingly technical in American life nonetheless came together long enough to give the citizens a little peace, for it was only when they were on the move that Americans could feel anchored in their memories.

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

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

So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purpose could be considered a white Negro.

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

Then the Warden said, "Do you have anything you'd like to say?" and Gary looked up at the ceiling and hesitated, then said, "Let's do it." That was it.