Quotes from Norman Mailer

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

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.

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

The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.

I don't hate women, but I think they should be kept in cages.

Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn't always enough.

To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.

It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.

Yeah, fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap.

Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way. p.207

No heart is so hard as the timid heart.

I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind

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.

Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.

Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful. In any case, good or bad, it reminds us that life is like a gladiators' arena for the soul and so we can feel strengthened by those who endure, and feel awe and pity for those who do not.

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

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

Historical, religious, and existential treatises suggest that for some persons at some times, it is rational not to avoid physical death at all costs. Indeed the spark of humanity can maximize its essence by choosing an alternative that preserves the greatest dignity and some tranquility of mind.

Let every writer tell his own lies That's freedom of the press.

You've seen too many movies. If you're holding a gun and you shoot a defenseless man, then you're a poor creature, a dastardly person. That's a perfectly ridiculous idea, you realize. The fact that you're holding the gun and the other man is not is no accident. It's a product of everything you've achieved, it assumes that if you're . . . you're aware enough, you have the gun when you need it.

That was how the tears went down Cherry's face...a teaspoon full of ten years' sorrow.

Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.

Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.

I won't stay in with married men any more said the wise girl they're too agreeable, it's a little too much like curling up with the good book. You mean a good book Oh, dear, did I say the good book sighed the witch.