Quotes from Norman Mailer

Alimony is the curse of the writing class.

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.

Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain our frail religion ... faith in the power of words.

The true religion of America has always been America.

The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.

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.

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

We can never know for certain where our prayers are likely to go, nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.

The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.

I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life.

Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.

Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.

In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.

Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existance in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is.

When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.

I hate everything which is not in myself.

Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time.

I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.

Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.

We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.