Quotes from Norman Mailer

Don't bug me or I'll gas you said the creep

Love was here today and left us dry did we deserve Him?

You let everything stand until it's knocked over and then you go over and write your own ruins

The compulsive talker must go through the herculean transformation of learning to quit or must become a great monologuist.

In its true exchange, one cannot gain a great deal unless one is willing to dare losing all.

Was it an hour, or a week before the light of the moon rose in the interior of my body? A bird with luminous wings flew in front of that full moon, and its head was as radiant as a point of light. That bird must be the Khu--this sweet bird of the night--a creature of divine intelligence loaned to us just so much as the Ren or the Sekhem. Yes, the Khu was a light in your mind while you lived, but in death, it must return to heaven. For the Khu was also eternal.

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

It aroused my paranoia (which is always there in ready supply, since it is preferable to poor powers of anticipation).

It was better than floods of misery that a son of her flesh had killed the sons of other mothers. That burned in her heart like the pain which flared in the arthritis of her knees. Pain was a boring conversationalist who never stopped, just found new topics. Bess

There remained a hole drilled through his heart.

Writing a novel is the closest thing a male writer will ever get to the experience of childbirth.

This business of living for eternity certainly contributed to capital punishment, brutality, and war.

Oh , kinda playing things by ear

Boredom slays more of existence than war.

Where, in what cemetery of the heavens, did the tender words of lovers rest when they loved no longer?

Let the passions and cupidities and dreams and kinks and ideals and greed and hopes and foul corruptions of all men and women have their day and the world will still be better off, for there is more good than bad in the sum of us and our workings.

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

not for nothing had Lenin pointed out that there were ten years which passed like an uneventful day, but there was also the revolutionary day which was like ten years.

Finally he said, "I like everything that wild Irish maniac, J. P. Donleavy, ever wrote." It wasn't so much a discussion as a sharing of taste. He also liked The Agony and the Ecstasy and Lust for Life by Irving Stone.

Kid, I can handle anything but the middle of the night.

Mi resi conto, allora, che l'unico vero collaudo della forza – del tono muscolare, per così dire – della sanità mentale è la capacità di sostenere l'urto di un interrogativo dietro l'altro senza che vi sia neanche l'ombra di una risposta.

Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say that 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.

Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree.

Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History.