Quotes from Norman Mailer

The Anti-Semiten. Why don't they ever learn? Why does God permit it?" Roth sneered. "God is a luxury I don't give myself.

Roth was irritated. Just because he was a Jew too, they always assumed he felt the same way about things. It made him feel a little frustrated. No doubt some of his bad luck had come because he was one, but that was unfair; it wasn't as if he took an interest, it was just an accident of birth.

Sequestered in the depths of the average pacifist—as one will invariably discover—resides a killer. That is why the person has become a pacifist in the first place.

The moments like these, the passing doubts, were the temptations that caught you if you were not careful.

A cop is a human creature born stupid and raised in stupidity.

Hearn's death was happily smudged, or at least on the surface, but ever since the second ambush he had been feeling the apprehension of a man in a dream who knows he is guilty, is waiting for his punishment, and cannot remember his crime.

I always thought,' I said, 'that a man became a cop to be shielded from his own criminality.

If men could move out of infancy at half a mile an hour and get up to eighteen thousand miles an hour in one lifetime, well, who was to assume that the walls of the universe were safe from future men?

Then comes the left jab again. A converted southpaw? It has something of the shift of locus which comes from making love to a brunette when she is wearing a blond wig.

Piety can also serve as a wall to keep the pious from recognizing how profoundly angry they are at God—this God who has failed to treat them by what they see as their proper right.

He does see Himself as the Divine Artist. Of course, He is also a blunderer—so many of His creations are botched. A good many are disasters which He then proceeds to plow back into the food chain. That is His only means of keeping His multitudinous, mediocre, and often meaningless spawnings from choking the existence of the rest. Yet, I will admit, He is dogged. He is still looking to improve His previous creations.

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.

It is easy to comprehend people who are weaker than ourselves, but it is not as simple to be ready for the true feelings of those more powerful.

The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.

How his hatred seethed in search of a justifiable excuse.

There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York. (on Tom Wolfe)

the Waldorf looked like one of the dead and empty spaces which collect about the exit of a man who has lost a million in an hour.

If the world turned Fascist, if Cummings had his century, there was a little thing he could do. There was always terrorism. But a neat terrorism with nothing sloppy about it, no machine guns, no grenades, no bombs, nothing messy, no indiscriminate killing. Merely the knife and the garrote, a few trained men, and a list of fifty bastards to be knocked off, and then another fifty.

Goldstein, you'd be a pretty good boy if you wasn't so chicken.

More sensitive than others in the beginning, we have to develop the will, the stamina, the determination, and the insensitivity to take critical abuse. A good writer, therefore, does well to see himself as a strong, weak person, full of brave timidity, sensitive and insensitive.

Having reshaped my words with an intensity of feeling I had not known before, I could not understand why others were not overcome with my sense of life, of sex, and of sadness.

It was probably a damn sight easier than getting rid of a woman who had found something in him that he didn't have or he didn't care to give.

He was full of love—for himself, first, and his prowess—such a fine power at his age. Then, he felt a degree of love for her—

it all seems more reasonable and possible until you put it figuratively, until the metaphorical end, which is always the muzzle if you come down to it, blasts you in the face.