Quotes from Norman Mailer

Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.

A democracy depends upon people getting brighter all the time. Democracies are delicate. They're not just ipso facto and just go on and on.

Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.

MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience.

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.

The paradox is that no love can prove so intense as the love of two narcissists for each other.

Love is simple to understand if you haven't got a mind soft and full of holes. It's a crutch, that's all, and there isn't any one of us that doesn't need a crutch.

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.

...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.

Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.

I guess all that's left is to love the fire.

I am convinced the most unfortunate people are those who would make an art of love. It sours other effort. Of all artists, they are certainly the most wretched.

Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.

The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

Boredom slays more of existence than war.

The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.

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

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.

I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.

There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.

Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.