Quotes from Norman Mailer

In the air the Pentagon would then, went the presumption, turn orange and vibrate until all evil emissions had fled this levitation. At that point the war in Vietnam would end.

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.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.

People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

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

There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.

I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.

You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.

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

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

There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.

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

One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.

Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.

The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one's passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.

The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture

We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.

The natural role of the twentieth-century man is anxiety.

Every one of my books had killed me a little more.

I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.